Income Gender Equality and Fertility: a Couple Approach

Giovanni Minchio, University of Trento
Stefani Scherer, University of Trento
Agnese Vitali, University of Trento

This paper studies the relationship between women’s share of the total couple’s income and first and second birth transitions, and how this relationship is moderated by household income and country-level gender equality. Early theories suggesting that, as women’s employment behaviour became more similar to that of men, fertility would decline, have been criticised and argued to be “theoretically and empirically unwarranted”. Demographic literature has since long underlined the relevance of gender equality for fertility decisions, predicting that fertility will rise again once full gender equality is being reached. Yet, the fertility advantage of equality might be also explained by the higher economic resources available to couples who contribute equally to the couples’ income. Thus, we rule out economic necessities by introducing a moderation with disposable household income. Then, since the equality-fertility relationship will develop depending on country-specific characteristics, we study how it changes based on the contextual level of gender equality. Drawing from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions longitudinal microdata we find support for an inverse U-shape relationship between the women’s share of the total couple’s income and transition to parenthood, while a negative relationship is found with transitions to a second child.

Keywords: Fertility, Gender Dynamics, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Comparative methods

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