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Cohort fertility and educational expansion in the Czech Republic during the 20th century

BACKGROUND:
During the 20th century the Czech Republic went through profound changes in female
employment, gender roles, population and family policies, and public childcare. The
educational structure of the female population changed tremendously. At the same time,
completed cohort fertility fluctuated between 1.8 and 2.2 children per woman.

OBJECTIVE:
This article analyses the changes in the level of completed cohort fertility by education,
during educational expansion in the Czech population under the economic, cultural, and
institutional background of the state socialist regime, and after its breakdown.
METHODS:
The changes in the level of completed cohort fertility by education are analysed by means of decomposition, complemented by the analysis of parity composition.
RESULTS: uring the 20th century, education-specific completed cohort fertility increased, rather than declined. Fertility levels converged upwards, contributing to high uniformity within educational categories. The overall changes in fertility levels were driven by changes in the educational structure. These trends resulted in the dominance of the twochild family, while large families were disappearing and childlessness dropped to the
biological minimum.
CONCLUSIONS: An egalitarian economic system with traditional family-friendly policies, in combination with a family-unfriendly labour market, developed into a male
breadwinner model of low gender equity. Future family policies should focus on the reconciliation of work and family.

CONTRIBUTION: he study contributes to the discussion on links between education and fertility, adding a new picture to the mosaic of country-level analyses. The Czech Republic is an example of a country with high educational homogeneity of fertility behaviour where the education-specific levels of fertility converged upwards.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6337
Date January 2018
CreatorsZeman, Krystof
PublisherMax Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Source SetsWirtschaftsuniversität Wien
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, PeerReviewed
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsCreative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Germany (CC BY 3.0 DE)
Relationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2018.38.56, http://www.demographic-research.org, https://www.demogr.mpg.de/de/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6337/

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