THE EFFECT OF ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING ON PUERTO-RICAN WOMENS LABOR-FORCE PARTICIPATION IN THE FORMAL SECTOR

The joint effort by the U.S. government and the political elite of Pue rto Rico to industrialize the island created increased demand for fema le labor and a decline in the number of jobs traditionally held by men . The authors examine whether women's labor force participation in the formal sector responds to improving opportunities for women, declinin g opportunities for men, or the household's changing opportunity struc tures. Specifically, they examine a woman's return to work after the b irth of her first child as the initial point of conflict between produ ctive and reproductive work. The data used in these analyses are from the 1982 Puerto Rican Fertility and Family Planning Assessment (PRFFPA ), an islandwide, representative sample of never-married and ever-marr ied women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. The authors esti mate a series of nested logistic regression models to evaluate the inf luence of occupational expansion or contraction on the timing of retur n to work after the first birth. Their findings offer selective suppor t for the idea that women's lives are affected primarily by the occurr ence of growing labor demand for women's labor.