Educated women more likely to have kids

Given the wide-ranging consequences of declining fertility rates, academics and policymakers around the world are increasingly interested in understanding what influences men’s and women’s decision to start a family. Hanna Virtanen, Mikko Silliman, Tiina Kuuppelomäki and Kristiina Huttunen explore how the relationship between education and family formation has evolved and whether the observed correlations are causal.

With fertility rates plunging below replacement levels, understanding the drivers of fertility has become a central aim for both policymakers and academics. Despite drastically divergent family policies in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States compared to those in Nordic countries, most Western countries exhibit remarkably similar trends in fertility rates over time.

One common trend has been that as countries developed, and educational levels of their citizens grew, fertility rates have decreased around the world. A potential explanation for this has been that education and the concomitant career aspirations it generates may make it difficult for women to combine career and family. As a result, highly educated women have garnered much of the attention of policymakers and academics related to family formation. At the same time, low rates of family formation among men with low levels of education have become cause for concern.

Policy has often focused on two fronts: men with low levels of education, who are least likely to form families, or on making career and family life more compatible for highly educated women.

In a recent discussion paper we examine the effects of education on family formation using admissions cutoffs to secondary and tertiary education in Finland. The results show that getting into further education at either education level does not increase the likelihood that men will form families. In contrast, women admitted to further education are more likely to both live with a partner and have children.

These results challenge the common idea that education hinders family formation for women but helps men find a partner. This idea was proposed by Gary Becker, who suggested that if men and women face different opportunities in the labour market, or if women hold comparative advantages in household production, the incentives for and consequences of education in terms of family formation could differ for men and women. Data across several countries from the latter half of the twentieth century support this idea.

But the past century has seen tremendous progress in the labour market opportunities for women and technological changes have weakened the economic incentives for one partner to specialise in household production. Over this period, the hump-shaped relationship between women’s education and family formation has begun to flatten or even reverse in countries with more egalitarian gender norms. In addition to changes in gender norms, several governments have implemented family policies that have made it increasingly possible to combine career and family. In fact, today, highly educated women in several high-income countries are more likely to form families than women with less education. As the recent Nobelist Claudia Goldin observes, educated women in recent cohorts are likely to want to have both a career and a family.

Our data from Finland show these same patterns. For birth cohorts from the 1940s, women with tertiary education were the least likely to form families. However, women born after 1975 who obtain higher education are more likely to form families than their peers with lower levels of education. All the while, the rates at which men at all levels of education form families have fallen across the board over the past several decades. Today, as before, men with higher levels of education are most likely to form families.

To isolate the effects of education on family outcomes, we focus on individuals on either side of unpredictable admissions thresholds to both secondary and tertiary education. Crossing the first admissions cutoff increases the probability that first-time applicants to secondary education obtain any secondary educational degree. Additionally, we focus on first-time applicants to universities of applied sciences, where crossing the threshold increases the probability that applicants complete any higher education. Both designs focus on how access to additional education affects those who either barely meet the criteria or are rejected by a small margin. We then follow men and women through their late thirties (age 38), tracing the effects of these initial admissions decisions on whether they cohabit or have children.

Our causal results show that increases in educational attainment raise the probability that women form families by their late thirties. Women admitted to secondary education are over 5 percentage points more likely to have a child by age 38. While these estimates are a little noisy, we obtain similar but more precise estimates at the margin for tertiary education. Women admitted to universities of applied science are about five percentage points (eight percent) more likely to have a child by age 38.

In contrast, for men, our analysis suggests that the large mean differences in family formation by educational attainment are driven by the types of men who pursue education rather than by education itself. This may be because men who tend to pursue education have stronger preferences for forming families or possess other qualities which make them attractive as partners. Conversely, men with low levels of education may face obstacles to family formation that education is incapable of overcoming.

Prior work highlights the potential importance of shifts in social norms and family policies like public childcare in supporting family formation for educated women. These policies are likely to play an important role in the Finnish context as well. Nonetheless, while these explanations may go a long way in helping understand why educated women may no longer experience a penalty for having children, they don’t explain why education improves rates of family formation for women, but not for men.

To delve into the potential mechanisms, we pre-register and test new hypotheses which could explain these diverging outcomes for men and women. Our findings support a skill-based explanation, where people are aware of the increasing returns to social skills in the labour market and the crucial role parents play in fostering these skills.

Moreover, as mothers remain the primary caregivers in families, even in relatively gender-equal countries like Finland, these changes may shift the burden of child development from schools to mothers. As a result, education can especially increase the attractiveness of women as potential partners, either by signalling parental ability or enabling women to pursue careers that better balance work and family. These findings highlight the increased importance of maternal education in shaping their children’s life chances. In line with our findings, recent studies show that highly educated mothers spend more time with their children in childcare intensive activities, even though they enjoy it less and face higher opportunity costs than their less educated peers.

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This blog post is based on Education, gender and family formation, LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) Discussion Paper number CEPDP2011.
The post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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