A Research Note on the Convergence of Childlessness Rates Between Women with Secondary and Tertiary Education in the Uni
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A Research Note on the Convergence of Childlessness Rates Between Women with Secondary and Tertiary Education in the United States Anna Rybińska1 Received: 14 March 2019 / Accepted: 9 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020, corrected publication 2020
Abstract A gap in childlessness rates between women with and without tertiary education in low-fertility settings has been well documented by scholars. However, in the United States, high rates of childlessness are declining for women with tertiary education. Will this current trend lead to a closing of the gap in childlessness across educational subgroups in this country? We answer this question using data from the Current Population Survey from 1976 through 2018. We present population-level trends in permanent childlessness by level of education and estimate the differences in the prevalence of childlessness across educational subgroups. Our findings indicate that the rates of childlessness for women aged 40–44 with tertiary education in the United States are the lowest they have been in over three decades and that rates of childlessness are converging among women with secondary and tertiary education. The declines in childlessness rates and the convergence in childlessness rates between women with secondary and tertiary education are observed for all of the three largest race/ethnicity sub-populations of American women: non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic women. This report contributes to the emerging literature on the convergence of childlessness rates across sub-populations of women with different levels of educational attainment, which questions the wellestablished observation that there is a positive relationship between education and childlessness. Keywords Fertility · Childlessness · Education · Current population survey · United States
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 0-019-09550-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Anna Rybińska [email protected] 1
Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Duke Box 90539, Durham, NC 27708, USA
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1 Introduction The existing research on the relationship between women’s educational attainment and fertility behaviour leaves no doubt that, at present, childlessness is educationally stratified: the prevalence of childlessness is much higher among women with tertiary education than among women with fewer years of education. A positive relationship between education and childlessness for the cohorts of women born between the 1940s and the 1960s has been well established across North America (Hayford 2013; Ravanera and Beaujot 2014), Europe (Wood et al. 2014; Miettinen et al. 2015; Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2017a), Australia and Japan (Hara 2008; Parr 2010; Wood et al. 2014). Why is having more education associated with an increased risk of childlessness for women? The most common explanations for this pattern include the higher opportunity costs of chi
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