Can fertility desires and expectations explain the association of education and occupation with childlessness?
Although there are well-established relationships between women’s higher education, labour force participation (LFP) and occupation with childlessness, the underlying reasons and the role that fertility desires and expectations play remains unclear. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the United States (N=4,198 women). We apply both logistic regression models to examine the role of fertility desires early in life, and multilevel models for repeated measures to examine the role of fertility expectations throughout the life course. We find that higher educational attainment and LFP was positively associated with childlessness. However, we do not find that these higher educated and working women more often desired to remain childless, or expected to remain childless. In contrast, when looking at women who eventually remain childless, we found that women who work full time and have higher status occupations had higher expectations to have children throughout their life course. These results suggest that education and occupation produces constraints, resulting in postponement of childbearing which hinder women in realizing their fertility desires and expectations. Our findings stress the importance of the compatibility between payed work and family life, as many working women remain childless despite the desire to become a mother. It furthermore highlights the importance of increasing awareness on decreasing fecundity with age.