Abstract
The discussion on the causes of the most recent fertility decline in Europe, and in particular on the emergence of lowest-low fertility, emphasizes the relevance of cultural factors in addition to economic ones. As part of such a cultural framework, the heterogeneity of preferences concerning the “career vs. family” dichotomy has been systematized in the “Preference Theory” approach developed by Catherine Hakim. This heterogeneity in preferences, however, has so far been underinvestigated in a comparative framework. This paper makes use of comparative data from the 2004/2005 Round of the European Social Survey to test the links between individual-level preferences and both fertility outcomes and fertility intentions, in a variety of societal settings. Results confirm an association between work–family lifestyle preferences and realized fertility in a variety of European countries, while they do not show a relationship between lifestyle preferences and fertility intentions. Results further support the existence of heterogeneous patterns of association between lifestyle preferences and fertility choices among welfare regimes.
Résumé
Le débat portant sur les causes de la baisse la plus récente de la fécondité en Europe, et en particulier sur l’émergence des fécondités les plus basses met l’accent sur le rôle des facteurs culturels, par-delà les facteurs économiques. Dans le cadre de ces facteurs culturels, l’hétérogénéité des préférences en matière de dilemme «carrière ou famille» a été formalisé par Catherine Hakim sous la forme de la «théorie des préférences». Cette hétérogénéité des préférences a toutefois été peu explorée dans une perspective comparative. Cet article exploite les données comparatives de la vague 2004/2005 de l’Enquête Sociale Européenne pour tester les liens entre les préférences individuelles, d’une part, et la fécondité réelle et souhaitée, d’autre part, dans des contextes sociaux très divers. Les résultats confirment une association entre les préférences en matière de mode de vie par rapport au travail et à la famille et la fécondité réelle dans toute une série de pays européens, mais ne mettent pas en évidence de lien entre les préférences en matière de mode de vie et la fécondité souhaitée. De plus, les résultats confirment l’existence de schémas hétérogènes d’association entre les préférences en matière de modes de vie et les choix de fécondité dans les différents régimes d’Etat-providence.
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Notes
“The US, Britain and probably the Netherlands currently provide the prime examples of societies that have achieved the new scenario for women. […] Most European countries still have little or nothing to actively enforce equal opportunities legislation. […] For example, in Greece, Italy and Spain, there is evidence of informal barriers to women’s access to the labour market: female unemployment rates are more than double those of males […]. Within the European Union, only Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands have a public body responsible for enforcing equal pay and equal opportunities laws” (Hakim 2003b, p. 360).
The expression “female returners” refers to “women who seek to re-enter the work-force after a few years of unpaid care-taking responsibilities” (Doorewaard et al. 2004, p. 8).
Edition 2.0, with data released on 8 March 2006. The original dataset includes all countries for which data have been deposited before 1 June 2005: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine.
The survey question used is the following: “People talk about the changing roles of husband and wife in the family. Here are three kinds of family. Which of them corresponds best with your ideas about the family?
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A family where the two partners each have an equally demanding job and where housework and the care of the children are shared equally between them.
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A family where the wife has a less demanding job than her husband and where she does the larger share of housework and caring for the children.
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A family where only the husband has a job and the wife runs the home.
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None of these three cases.”
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The survey question used is the following: “If without having to work you had what you would regard as a reasonable living income, would you still prefer to have a paid job, or wouldn’t you bother?”
The survey question used is the following: “Who is the main income-earner in your household? Is it yourself? Your partner/spouse? Both of you jointly? Or someone else?”
Forty respondents were classified both as family-oriented and as career-oriented. Actually, the questions used for classifying women are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, all the three questions used are opinion questions, so the answers could be driven by social norms rather than by the respondents' subjective ideals. For instance, while men usually define themselves as primary earners even when they are actually not, women sometimes answer in the opposite direction––cf. Hakim (2003b, p. 363) for a similar argument. For the remainder of this analysis, these cases will be excluded.
Unfortunately, we could not consider Italy in this study, since Italian data were not comparable with other ESS-2 data.
The question on fertility intentions is asked only to women aged 45 years or less. We also exclude from our analyses observations for which the relationship of the respondent with other household members is missing, when the respondent is not the only person in the household.
A closer correspondence between fertility intentions and behaviours may be achieved when intentions refer to an explicit time interval (Miller and Pasta 1995).
We found that the parallel regression assumption is not violated if the ordered logit models are run on the sub-sample of women with at least one child, thus suggesting that passing from parity zero to parity one is very different from experiencing other transitions, as shown in other studies (Testa and Grilli 2006). However, this solution implies a considerable reduction of the sample size and excludes from the analysis a significant proportion of work-oriented women who, according to Preference Theory, are frequently childless. We therefore decided to estimate generalized ordered models, which do not impose the constraints of parallel regression.
This negative effect of being career oriented on fertility intentions in Britain becomes even higher if we run the same set of models only on the sub-sample of women living in a union, who—according to Hakim—should also have more clear life preferences. In other words, among married or cohabiting women, the consistency of the Preference Theory increases in the case of Britain, while the effect is lost in the case of Denmark. Results for these models are not shown because of the considerable reduction of the sample size they involve.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by the European Commission (DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities) under the Project “Fertility intentions and outcomes: The role of policies to close the gap” (VS/2006/0685). The main parts of the paper were written while the first author visited the Vienna Institute of Demography. We are grateful to Laurent Toulemon for comments and suggestions, as well to the participants of the 2007 Annual Conference of the Population Association of America (New York) and to the “Demosoc” seminar at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona for useful comments.
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Vitali, A., Billari, F.C., Prskawetz, A. et al. Preference Theory and Low Fertility: A Comparative Perspective. Eur J Population 25, 413–438 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-009-9178-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-009-9178-x