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The limited effect of increasing educational attainment on childlessness trends in twentieth-century Europe, women born 1916-65

During the twentieth century, trends in childlessness varied strongly across European countries while educational attainment grew continuously across them. Using census and large-scale survey data from 13 European countries, we investigated the relationship between these two factors among women born between 1916 and 1965. Up to the 1940 birth cohort, the share of women childless at age 40+ decreased universally. Afterwards, the trends diverged across countries. The results suggest that the overall trends were related mainly to changing rates of childlessness within educational groups and only marginally to changes in the educational composition of the population. Over time, childlessness levels of the medium-educated and high-educated became closer to those of the low-educated, but the difference in level between the two better educated groups remained stable in Western and Southern Europe and increased slightly in the East.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:5922
Date21 August 2016
CreatorsBeaujouan, Eva, Brzozowska, Zuzanna, Zeman, Krystof
PublisherTaylor & Francis
Source SetsWirtschaftsuniversität Wien
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, PeerReviewed, info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsCreative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Relationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2016.1206210, http://www.tandfonline.com/, http://www.cfe-database.org, http://epub.wu.ac.at/5922/, info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/284237/EU/ Fertility, reproduction and population change in 21st Century Europe/EURREP

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