Different women’s employment and fertility behaviours in similar institutional settings: Evidence from Italy and Poland
Abstract
In this paper we compare Italy and Poland, two countries where the country-specific obstacles
to work and family reconciliation are similarly strong, but which differ in terms of the history of
women’s labour force participation and of household living standards. We adopt a life course
perspective, and trace women’s employment choices around the first and the second birth. On
the one hand, our findings suggest the presence of a strong conflict between women’s paid work
and childbearing in both countries. On the other, our results show that women’s employment
clearly inhibits childbearing in Italy, while in Poland women tend to combine the two activities.
Overall, we find that countries characterised by similarly strong institutionally or culturally
driven tensions between work and family may differ in how women’s fertility and employment
behaviours are interrelated.
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