4 - Fertility and Female Work Status in the USSR

Abstract

A very high proportion of women in the USSR are gainfully employed. A question of major concern to Soviet demographers is the effect of such high female employment rates on fertility. Soviet empirical studies of the relation between the number of children a woman has borne and the number of years she has worked reveals a rather clear-cut negative relationship but these studies can be criticized because they fail to hold constant other relevant variables such as educational attainment and marital status. It is clear that the relatively high enrollments of Soviet children in preschool and extended day school facilities help to ease the overload brought about by the double burden of work and domestic responsibilities. The American demographer Mazur challenges the belief that a high rate of female labor force participation leads to a low level of fertility. Mazur is correct in his finding that variations in female-labor force participation in local areas of the Soviet Union in 1959 can explain practically none of the variations in fertility in these areas. Yet the reason is not so much that the relationship between fertility level and female work participation level is less strong in the USSR than in other countries but rather that in the Soviet Union there is so little regional variation in the level of female work participation. An important feature of the relationship between these 2 variables in the USSR was that the relationship between female work participation and fertility in 1959 was more pronounced in the rural than in the urban portions of the local areas. The period from 1959-1970 was noteworthy for a substantial increase in female work activity as well as a substantial reduction in the birth rate. A multivariate analysis of change in fertility from 1959-1970 among the 15 Soviet Union Republics showed that increase in the female work-participation rate was negatively related to fertility increase.