Entry to motherhood and higher education in three regimes of welfare capitalism

Michael Rendall, Office for National Statistics
Encarnación Aracil, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Christos Bagavos, Panteion University
Christine Couet, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE)
A. Dharmalingam, University of Waikato
Paola Di Giulio, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Trude Lappegård, Statistics Norway
Philip Merrigan, Université du Québec à Montréal
Filomena Racioppi, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Marit Ronsen, Norway Statistics Bureau
Steve Smallwood, ONS
Georgia Verropoulou, University of the Aegean

Institutional theories of fertility change have argued that family-policy environments may mediate changes in the associations between women’s educational attainment and their fertility. To test this, we analyze cohort change in educational attainment and timing of first birth by education for 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts in ten countries, representing three “regimes” of family policy and labor market conditions: (1) strong family-policy regimes in Denmark, France, and Norway; (2) weak family-policy regimes with dynamic labor markets in Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and (3) weak family-policy regimes with rigid labor markets in Greece, Spain, and Italy. Each of these groups of countries further exhibits a range of prevalence, and of increases in, women’s participation in higher education. This allows us to explore in parallel differences in timing and prevalence of entry to motherhood by cohort, by education, and by welfare-capitalist “regime” (Esping-Andersen 1999).