Continued home attachment versus transition to employment: An intensity regression analysis of Swedish one-child mothers

This paper analyzes the simultaneous influence of background factors such as educational level and civil status on the subsequent work life transitions among women who remained at home one year after first birth. The analysis is limited to non-pregnant one-child mothers, whose child is less than 5 years old.

Fitting hazard models separately to the transitions to full-time and part-time work respectively, results in fairly similar final models for the two transitions. Social background has no significant impact on the propensity of one-child mothers to stop being full-time housewives and return to the labour market, except via the intervening educational variable. Length of education at the time of first birth is, however, a strongly influential factor, with highly educated women (four years or more after the age of 16) about three times as likely to start working, either part-time or full-time, than women with shorter education.

Civil status has no impact on the transition to part-time work, but co­habiting women are more inclined to start full-time work than are married women. Early labour force withdrawal has a depressing effect on the propensity to start working again among home-attached one-child mothers. This effect is stronger with regard to part-time work, indicating that women who stop working more than three months prior to first birth are not interested in the "compromise" of part-time work combined with housework and childrearing. They intend to stay at home for an extended period of time and not work in the interval between births.

The analysis is based on data from the Swedish Fertility Survey in 1981, in which 4 300 women between 20 and 44 years old were interviewed