Couples’ division of labor and fertility in Taiwan

Abstract

The rise in women’s labor force participation is fundamentally changing the nature and intensity of domestic labor and increasing concerns about the prospects for fertility, particularly in gender-inegalitarian societies. To keep pace with these changes, the gender revolution perspective argues that increasing men’s involvement in the family will reduce burdens on women and facilitate fertility recuperation. This paper investigates the effect of labor sharing on fertility. Using ten waves of data from the Taiwanese Panel Study of Family Dynamics (8,863 couple-wave observations, 1,969 couples), latent class analysis was first used to define a division of labor typology, and mixed-effects models were subsequently estimated to investigate the associations between the division of labor arrangements and fertility behavior. Although the male-breadwinner model prevailed as the most conducive to childbearing, there is an urgent imperative to improve gender equality in domestic labor given the growing trend of dual-earner families. The results highlight the importance of considering couples’ paid and unpaid labor in relation to each other and suggest that gendered divisions of domestic labor have different implications on fertility depending on employment arrangements.