THE COMPATIBILITY OF EMPLOYMENT AND CHILDBEARING IN CONTEMPORARY SWEDEN

Popular theory wants to explain much of the fertility decline of the 1 960s and the 1970s as a consequence of the growth in paid employment a mong women during the same period. The negative relationship generally found between family size and women's labour-force participation on t he individual level is often given a similar interpretation. Our findi ngs in this paper suggest that such notions are too simple. In an anal ysis of data from the Swedish fertility survey of 1981, there is a red uction in labour-force participation connected with childbearing, but we are unable to discern any appreciable converse influence of the ind ividual employment history on childbearing patterns, represented here by the progression to the third birth. We also find the opposite of wh at economic theory has predicted concerning the impact of education on childbearing: more highly educated Swedish mothers of two children pr ogress to a third birth more readily than corresponding women with les s education. The one-sided influence from childbearing to reduced empl oyment should be sufficient to explain the negative relationship menti oned, and it seems that an understanding of the causes of the fertilit y decline must be found elsewhere than in a theory of labour-specific or education-based human-capital accumulation on the individual level. We offer as a hypothesis the possibility that present-day general fer tility trends in affluent populations may be governed more by ideation al developments that flow through societies as a whole than by an accu mulation of effects of materialistic computations made independently b y individual couples.