Changes in Employment Uncertainty and the Fertility Intention–Realization Link: An Analysis Based on the Swiss Household Panel

Recent below-replacement fertility has prompted an animated debate among demographers seeking a better understanding of childbearing intentions. Recent studies have found intentions to be a powerful predictor of fertility at the aggregate level (Morgan and Rackin 2010; Quesnel-Vallee and Morgan 2003; Liefbroer et al. 2015). At the individual level, however, intentions do not always match actual outcomes, as the authors above indicate. There is a consensus among scholars that low total fertility (with the total fertility rate—TFR—below 1.5) results from obstacles that intervene between the intention to have children and their realization. Employment uncertainty is one such obstacle. The fear of losing one’s job and becoming unemployed while establishing one’s career are among the main obstacles to realizing childbearing intentions.

Previous studies, however, offer a variety of arguments for the intention–realization gap. First, the effect of employment uncertainty on fertility may differ between partners; yet, most studies focus on women’s childbearing decisions made despite the employment uncertainty of their partners (for exceptions, see Kravdal 2002; Gebel and Giesecke 2009). Second, objective employment uncertainty (e.g. unemployment, precarious contracts) is in the same way associated with fertility as perceived employment uncertainty (e.g. fear of losing one’s job), which is in itself a deterrent to childbearing (Golsch 2003; Bernardi et al. 2008; Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2014; Hofmann and Hohmeyer 2013). Third, the association between employment uncertainty and fertility may differ depending on socio-economic resources. Often, employment uncertainty generates high opportunity costs in terms of forgone career promotions or salary increases among highly educated populations and therefore results in delayed parenthood and fewer births in this group (Rindfuss et al. 1996; Martin 2000; Adsera 2004; Blossfeld et al. 2005; Kravdal and Rindfuss 2008; Pailhé and Solaz 2012). Fourth, both employment uncertainty and fertility intentions may be differentially unstable over time depending on employment status. The latter has been examined by Spéder and Kapitány (2009), who show that unemployed men in Hungary were more likely to abandon childbearing intentions than those who were employed.

This article identifies the way in which changes in employment uncertainty are linked to changes in fertility intentions and behaviour over a 2-year period, by linking uncertainty to intention trajectories (e.g. keep intending to have a child, abandoning or postponing an intention to have a child). The analysis distinguishes between male and female partners’ changes in perceived employment uncertainty, and examines differences in these associations by education levels. The analysis also includes fertility intentions of both members of a couple, since research has confirmed that partners’ disagreement leads to substantial delay in childbearing (Testa et al. 2011). Our analysis addresses two central research questions. First, what are the effects of a rise and decline in male and female employment uncertainty on fertility intentions and their realization? Second, to what extent do effects of employment uncertainty vary according to education level?

To address our questions, we use panel data from ten waves of the Swiss Household Panel (SHP 2002–2011). The SHP contains information about short-term fertility intentions in each wave starting from 2002. Drawing on Spéder and Kapitány’s analyses (2009), we explicitly focus on short-term fertility intentions, which refer to having a child within two years and the follow-up on an intention during the respective time period, i.e. intended births. Our analyses focus on partnered men and women of reproductive age, thus covering the relationship between their fertility intentions and each partner’s employment uncertainty. Employment uncertainty as analysed here refers to an employed person’s assessment of how secure his or her job is, or how likely he or she is to lose the job in the near future, which is in line with the definition of ‘cognitive’ job insecurity (Anderson and Pontusson 2007; Esser and Olsen 2011).

The study context is Switzerland, a country where remarkably low-fertility rates (e.g. the TFR was 1.54 according to OFS data of 2014) and high rates of childlessness correlate with highly gendered labour market participation. While men work almost universally in full-time jobs, women, whose labour force participation is high, work mostly part time (Sobotka and Zeman 2011; Levy et al. 2006). Part-time jobs are often more precarious, often associated with low income (Charles 2011) and restricted options to contribute to retirement pensions, which mostly concerns women with children (Liebig et al. 2015). In addition, in Switzerland work–family reconciliation policies are poor: childcare is extremely expensive and its provision insufficient to meet the demand, and paternity and parental leave do not exist at the federal level (Valarino and Bernardi 2010). In such a context, perceived employment uncertainty may be due to worries of losing a job even if on a permanent contract, or due to (especially women’s) worries of not being able to balance work with childrearing and care duties.

Since the 1980s, job insecurity has become an inherent characteristic of adult life, and this has long-term implications. Main biographical events in this life stage include entry into and establishment in the labour market, organizing and managing one’s own career, and the birth of one’s first child. Increasing employment uncertainty during the recession years and cyclical economic upturns have made these processes more complicated (Blossfeld et al. 2005). As a consequence, an individual’s time and resources, which would otherwise be invested elsewhere, are put towards efforts to maintain or re-establish one’s position in the labour market. Childrearing suffers fierce competition in such situations of scarce resources (McDonald 2000; Voydanoff 2005; Philipov 2009). The difficulty to combine the roles of parent and employee is seen as a major reason for the postponement of fertility observed in most advanced Western societies nowadays (Matysiak and Vignoli 2008; Blossfeld and Hofmeister 2007; Kreyenfeld et al. 2012).

Time incompatibility is often resolved by a sequential ordering of events, which means that some events get postponed. One example of the ordering of events is the sequence of stabilizing one’s labour market position followed by a first birth (Bernardi et al. 2008). This sequence is due, on the one hand, to the widespread assumption that stabilizing one’s labour market position is a way to ensure the material resources and work autonomy required to care responsibly for one’s child (Begall and Mills 2011). On the other hand, institutions regulating the education and labour market transitions are more rigidly organized around strict age schedules in early young adulthood in comparison with parenthood: no institution is proclaiming one must become a parent by a particular age. The consequence is that the postponement of births until the labour market position is certain is a shared social norm, especially in contexts where incompatibility of work and family is high (Hochschild and Manchung 1989).

The way individuals respond to employment uncertainty is likely to depend on the welfare system, as well as on the education level and the prevalent attitudes towards work. The extent to which employment uncertainty constrains a person’s ability to accommodate work around childcare and sustain a family is decisive in this response (Voydanoff 2005). A number of empirical studies confirm the negative impact of uncertainty on fertility by education (Kohler and Kohler 2002; Fiori et al. 2013; Kreyenfeld 2009). Even though anticipations are hard to make, employment aspirations and the opportunities to combine work and family life expand along with rising education levels (Korpi 2000). On the one hand, highly educated persons are generally better able to collate the resources they need to avoid risks resulting from employment uncertainty, and they usually return to the labour market more quickly after childbirth (Liefbroer and Corijn 1999; Adsera 2011). This group is less vulnerable to economic downturns and times of high unemployment. On the other hand, human capital theorists suggest that since highly educated individuals face higher opportunity costs of childbearing, they make fertility decisions more deliberately (Spéder and Kapitány 2009). They may develop work-oriented lifestyles (Berrington 2004) and be more likely to abandon their fertility plans if their employment is uncertain or if professional advancement competes with childbearing. A Swiss study showed that young low-educated women tend to choose an apprenticeship or a formation oriented towards a professional career that allows the reconciliation between family and work (Gianettoni et al. 2015). Studies show also that a lot of women, yet, at least temporarily withdraw from the labour market, before they eventually return part time to it (Levy et al. 2006). Such a traditional family model increases the likelihood that fertility intentions and behaviour in this group vary strongly in relation to the relatively unfettered exposure of the main income provider to the economic climate. Education may have a direct impact on the link between childbearing intentions and subsequent behaviour, because the ability to pursue one’s own plans and to overcome obstacles that impede intentions from being realized could depend on informal support networks that differ according to education level (Rossier and Bernardi 2009).

The response to employment uncertainty in adult lives implies the existence of a decision-making process (Blossfeld and Hofmeister 2007). Intentions are a main component of the irreversible decision whether or not to have a child (Miller and Pasta 1994; Johnson-Hanks 2005). Several studies, however, show that the fertility levels forecasted by intentions do not match actual fertility (Toulemon and Testa 2005; Quesnel-Vallee and Morgan 2003), as fertility goals are generally over- or underachieved or change over time. While some thus attributed a minor role to fertility intentions, for instance at the time of the baby boom when modern contraception was not broadly diffused and the TFR exceeded the level of intended births (Quesnel-Vallee and Morgan 2003; Bongaarts 2002), other scholars have concluded that change in fertility intentions over time helps to better understand why people revise and especially abandon their fertility plans (Léridon 1995). The better we understand changes in intentions, the better we will understand the corresponding behaviour. Intentions are considered antecedents of behaviour in Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour (TPB) (Ajzen and Klobas 2013). This model has been applied to several behaviours including fertility behaviour (Liefbroer et al. 2015). In contrast to the broader concept of ‘intended family size’ (often called lifetime intentions) and the intention to have any more children at all, short-term intentions tell us something about the timing of childbirth (Philipov and Bernardi 2011). Respondents to fertility surveys might, over a period of 2–3 years, become clearer about their personal life conditions and any obstacles that prevent them from realizing their intentions. Short-term intentions are therefore argued to be strongly linked to external conditions and to changes in these conditions (in our case changes in employment uncertainty); that is, people may adapt an intention to have a child in the course of two to three years by postponing or abandoning childbearing. We would like to add that one shall exercise caution when using short-term intentions to estimate the incidence of realization or the effects of life conditions on non-realization; in such cases, realizations might be underestimated and the effect of life conditions overestimated (Schoen et al. 1999; Berrington 2004).

According to Blossfeld and Hofmeister (2007), individuals who experience employment uncertainty (such as worries about losing one’s job) may delay childbearing. More precisely, employment uncertainty undermines the intention to have a child in two ways: it may have a direct effect on its formation or it may hinder its realization. These links are presented graphically in Fig. 1. Line (1) presents the impact of changes in employment uncertainty on the construction of intention trajectories (such as maintaining positive intentions over time, abandoning an intention, and postponing an intention), and Line (2) shows the link between an intention to have a child and its realization.

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Consider the first case where we examine the fertility intention trajectory (Line 1) under perceived employment uncertainty. Suppose that an individual wants to have a child without postponement and experiences employment uncertainty. In this case, the individual will face conflicts of time and energy, and unpredictable material resources. Such conflict and the limited capacity to secure family income can be resolved by abandoning the intention to have a child, i.e. prioritizing one life domain over the other, or by postponing childbearing until later years, i.e. sequencing transitions. In this case, the individual is expected to change an intention to have a child as follows: a person may abandon an intention to have a child (the abandoner group) or may postpone such an intention (the postponer group). Alternatively, if a person experiences a reduction in employment uncertainty and has not yet reached the personal fertility goal, this person is expected to continue intending to have a child (the stable yes group).

In the second case, we examine the intention–realization link (Line 2) under perceived employment uncertainty. In the empirical analysis that follows, we consider employment uncertainty as a condition to the construction and realization of an intention to have a child. For the sake of simplicity in the schematic representation, changes in employment conditions referring to a rise and decline in employment uncertainty are included in the same block in Fig. 1.

Moreover, using the human capital theory, we examine the education argument (Line 3) that suggests education increases the opportunity costs of childbearing, and that it is a main deterrent in the intention to have a child, as well as its realization. Purveyors of human capital theory argue that the more educated people are, the higher the opportunity costs of realizing their fertility intentions are, and these costs are difficult to recuperate at later stages of life (Rondinelli et al. 2010). Consequently, facing individual employment uncertainty will interfere in the more deliberate childbearing decisions of the highly educated group and most likely hamper the intention to have a child, and thus, subsequent childbearing. In this group, establishing oneself on the labour market is expected to compete more strongly with responsibly caring for children even if highly educated persons often have stronger support networks (Rossier and Bernardi 2009). In the case of low-educated people, their fewer personal resources make them sensitive to general changes in economic climate and overall job insecurity, rather than to changes in the individual employment uncertainty. We thus distinguish highly educated from low- and medium-educated individuals when we analyse the link between employment uncertainty and fertility intentions and behaviour.

Based on the theoretical framework outlined above, we argue that worsening employment conditions facilitate the postponement or abandonment of the intention to have a child (intention–trajectory argument), and certainly make it less probable that the intention be realized (intention–realization argument). Employment conditions that are improving make it more likely that the intention to have a child be maintained (intention–trajectory argument), or realized by the end of the two-year period (intention–realization argument). Education should be decisive in how individuals make childbearing decisions under worsening or improving employment conditions (education argument). According to our conceptual background, childbearing intentions always refer to a period of 2 years.

Women’s opportunity costs can be compensated by various factors such as social support by family and friends in childrearing; child allowances or maternal leave could be attractive particularly to women with lower education (Friedman et al. 1994). In these and similar situations, rising women’s employment uncertainty may emerge as facilitating rather than constraining not only behaviour, but also intentions.

This study explored changes in employment uncertainty, the formation of fertility intentions, and the realization of such intentions among working couples living in Switzerland. We have tested two situations: a rise in employment uncertainty and a decline in employment uncertainty. We have formulated three arguments, concerning (1) the association between employment uncertainty effects and fertility intentions, (2) their realization, and (3) differences in these associations by education. We checked the hypotheses in the context of Switzerland, where a highly liberal labour market and poor work–family reconciliation policies (Armingeon 2001; Armingeon et al. 2004) and gendered parenting norms (Bühlmann et al. 2016) translate into high levels of childlessness and low fertility (Sobotka 2011). A focus on the Swiss context is relevant, because employment uncertainty may reflect worries of losing a job even if on a permanent contract, or it may be due to worries of not being able to reconcile working with childrearing and care duties. We found that the results are specific according to education levels. The summary is presented first for the intention trajectories and subsequently for the intentions and actual childbearing.

We confirm our intention-trajectory argument (1): Worsening employment conditions of men and women facilitate abandonment, and women’s worsening employment conditions motivate postponement as well. However, the association between women’s improved employment conditions and their fertility intentions is less straightforward, because these conditions facilitate either the construction or the abandonment of an intention to have a child. An improvement of women’s employment situation can either indicate an increase in options and resources for them to achieve fertility goals (for instance privileges tied to permanent contracts), or it can indicate strong involvement in the labor market, which competes with childrearing and care duties. These associations hold true only for respondents with a high level of education. Indeed, the relationship between childbearing and employment may be moderated by education. More than 20% of highly educated women in Switzerland remain childless (Sobotka and Zeman 2011); there is a strong trend to choose higher involvement in lifelong employment over a commitment to raising children. These women often live in educationally homogamous couples and experience lengthy employment episodes due to pooling their resources compared to their less educated peers (Blossfeld and Timm 2003).

This finding is an extension of the pioneering work of Spéder and Kapitány (2009), which was based upon the effects of unemployment on fertility intentions trajectories. The results reported here support their assumption that using a more refined indicator than a simplified activity status might help to better understand effects of women’s employment conditions on fertility decision-making. In our case, the observed trajectory of postponement can be viewed as resulting from a tendency to commit fully to work in order to establish a strong labour market position—a priority especially among highly educated women—which often competes with their commitment to other life domains, such as responsibly caring for a child. The reported results also indicate a modernized ‘breadwinner model’ where men and women both engage in paid labour and, therefore, their time and energy are compromised by the task of caring for their child(ren) (Hochschild and Manchung 1989).

We confirm the intention–realization argument (2): women’s improved employment conditions are conducive to childbearing. Men’s improved employment conditions are not found to encourage childbearing, even if an intention to have a child were to exist. No statistically significant associations were found for the realization of an intention to have a child and worsening employment conditions.

These findings suggest that childbearing depends upon women’s employment conditions, the potential opportunity costs, and possibilities of balancing time and energy spent at work and in the home. The results hold only true for respondents with a high level of education.

We confirm the education argument (3): changes in employment conditions [(1) and (2)] have a strong impact on the relationship between fertility intention and realization among highly-educated individuals, but no significant impact among low- and medium-educated individuals.

Employment uncertainty hampers childbearing intentions among the highly educated population, which suggests that opportunity costs of childbearing and the efforts related to responsibly caring for a child play a major role. On the contrary, among medium- and low-educated populations, material constraints hamper childbearing intentions from being realized. The latter result lends support to Kohler and Kohler’s argument (2002) that men’s unstable employment, thus uncertain income, hampers fertility. Likewise, a higher unemployment rate during an economic crisis hampers the realization of intentions among the highly educated population and makes individuals with medium or low levels of education more likely to abandon the idea of childbearing. A potential explanation is that the former delay childbearing until employment conditions improve, whereas the latter give up on the idea altogether due to the material deprivation they face.

Some limitations of this study should be mentioned. First, this study is limited to short-term fertility intentions. Since they neither inform about the intended number of children nor capture the entire reproductive lifespan of the respondent, it remains unclear whether postponers or those who maintain their intention to have a child actually achieve their goal; we are also aware that our measurement of intentions over a 24-month period may not be sufficient to grasp variations in intentions in the very short run; neither did it allow insight into sudden intention change due to critical events (e.g. an acute illness). The analytical choice of our time frame, however, allows us to capture the capacity to form concrete childbearing plans in the near future. Second, dynamic approaches like event history techniques should be used to predict the timing of intention change and births. Given that lives are not solely experienced as a sequence of changes and events, we chose a holistic approach to estimate fertility intention/(behaviour) trajectories as well as to be able to assess the probability that individuals do not change an intention to have or not to have a child. Such an approach is especially valuable in low-fertility contexts where large parts of the reproductive-age population postpone childbearing, and therefore, individuals who continue to intend to have a child are most likely delaying having children. This approach was also the best way to handle our data, specifically the panel attrition within our sample of reproductive-age individuals. Third, this study examines the experienced employment uncertainty and the one related to limited-term contracts, as these are the best available indicators for employment uncertainty in our dataset. The inclusion of transitions into and out of unemployment would have been interesting, although differences in fertility intentions of the employed and unemployed are more likely driven by the conjugal situation, the level of education, and migratory background (Pailhé and Solaz 2012). The number of observations—both unemployed respondents and their transitions into or out of unemployment—is too low to warrant their inclusion into the studied sample. Moreover, the reciprocal influence of partners on each other’s fertility intentions (Testa et al. 2014; Cavalli and Rosina 2011) and the higher risk of disagreement among highly educated couples (Rosina and Testa 2009) would have motivated a couple intention analysis, but our focus on intention trajectories and intentions and their realization did not warrant such a strategy due to small numbers. We note that in the current analysis the numbers of respondents in the highly educated group are small in some categories, such as the abandoners and the postponers group. Finally, future work should address employment uncertainty throughout one’s lifespan and in relation to other life domains and stages in order to account for people’s actual priorities as well as priority shifts that matter for reproductive decisions.

Despite such limitations, our results have a number of implications for our understanding of the nuances of the link between employment uncertainty and fertility intentions and their realization. First, although few differences in the effect on fertility with respect to a rise in uncertainty were observed by gender, major gender differences in the association of a male versus a female uncertainty decline were found. This suggests that in contrast to men, women—especially highly educated women—still seem to be confronted with the choice between having a career and investing in the labour market (to reduce their employment uncertainty) or having a child. Second, fertility intentions/behaviour trajectories varied considerably between educational groups, and a few socio-economic differences in the uncertainty–fertility link were observed. This suggests that one should not juxtapose multiple socio-economic groups but should rather account for the variety of educational backgrounds and how these influence their reproductive decisions. Third, our analysis showed that childbearing intentions and their realization are related to subjective evaluations on the future labour market participation; those who abandon the intention to have a child do so because their labour market prospects are bleak. Overall, we show that if reproductive decisions vary by educational group, they also vary within educational groups, according to individuals’ labour market perspectives and their partners. Our findings are conservative, since we are analysing the Swiss context in which, despite increased feelings of economic insecurity, unemployment, and labour market uncertainty are low. In contexts of higher unemployment and labour market uncertainty, social inequalities by gender, education, and access to the labour market may play a larger role in determining who is able to realize childbearing intentions and who is not.