Childbearing Behaviours of Employed Women in Italy and Poland

The aim of this study was to increase our understanding of women’s fertility and employment behaviours in contexts that do not support combining work and family. We analysed how women’s employment in Italy and Poland correlated with their transition to motherhood and later with the transition to a second child. The two countries are both characterized by very low fertility, strong attachment to Catholic values and little support to working parents. However, they also display key differences that make this comparison informative: they differ in female labour supply developments and in the extent to which earned wages satisfy material aspirations. In this study piecewise linear hazard models were applied to national longitudinal data. Our findings showed that women’s employment constitutes a clear barrier to childbearing in Italy, whereas in Poland women seem better able to combine a professional career with having children. Overall, the study demonstrated that similarly adverse institutional settings towards combining work and family may operate through different social and cultural forces, as well as constraints and opportunities, leading to the women’s different fertility and employment strategies.