DIFFERENTIAL FERTILITY WITHIN AN ETHNIC-MINORITY - THE EFFECT OF TRYING HARDER AMONG CHINESE-AMERICAN WOMEN

In this paper we introduce a mechanism by which membership in a minori ty group can depress fertility. Institutionalized discrimination again st Chinese-American women is commonplace in U.S. society. Chinese wome n who want to overcome labor market discrimination and achieve social and economic equality with women in the majority population must there fore try harder or make extra effort. Not all women choose this path, but those who do and who succeed generally do so at a price in terms o f time and energy. The price is also reflected in reduced numbers of c hildren. We simultaneously test the hypothesized fertility effect of e fforts to overcome structural discrimination against other theories of fertility determinants concerning the effects of (1) pro-natalist sub cultural norms and (2) socioeconomic and cultural assimilation. We fit Poisson regression models for the number of children ever born to ind ividual-level data from the 1980 U.S. Census of Population and find st rong empirical support for each of the three hypotheses. In particular , the measure of the extra effort Chinese-Americans make in combatting structural discrimination is negatively related to their fertility, a nd this effect is highly significant across several models. Chinese-Am erican women who are the most successful in achieving social and econo mic equality with non-Hispanic white women have 18 percent fewer child ren than their Chinese sisters who have made little effort to overcome discrimination. This effect is twice as large as the net differential impact on fertility of being foreign-born versus native-born.