Unraveling the Pathways to Involuntary Childlessness in a Low Fertility Context: A Multichannel Sequence Analysis of Spanish Women

Jesús García Gómez, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Centre D'Estudis demogràfics (CED)
Alberto Del Rey Poveda, University of Salamanca
Mengyao Wu, University of Salamanca
Guillermo Orfao, University of Salamanca

Involuntarily childless women (ICW) are a growing group in societies with low and very low fertility. Examining their characteristics and life paths is paramount for informing public policies. In Spain, 15% of women born between 1962 and 1973 are ICW. We use the Spanish Fertility Survey (2018) and implement a Multichannel Sequence Analysis to establish the different “types” of ICW. We finish describing the characteristics of the “types”, paying special attention to changes in their shares over birth cohort. Our results show the existence of four “types” of ICW. Three of them resemble the “career oriented”, “family oriented”, and the “adaptative women” “types” proposed by Hakim’s Preference Theory. We define the remaining one as “stayers”, encompassing women who have resided in their parental home throughout most of their reproductive years and have almost never lived with their partners. We demonstrate that the distribution of these "types" is undergoing rapid changes across cohorts: the percentage of those categorized as "family-oriented" is decreasing, while the proportion of "career-oriented" ICW is on the rise.

Keywords: Fertility, Longitudinal studies

See paper.