Abstract
This article builds on microdata from the Birth Sample Survey (BSS) carried out by Istat in 2005 and 2012 in order to analyse changes in the occupational status of mothers of young children. We aim in particular to broaden the understanding of the individual and contextual characteristics that can affect the probability of women who were employed during pregnancy of not returning to work in the two years following the child’s birth. The study contributes to existing literature on mothers’ employment in two main ways. First, we take into consideration the different nature - voluntary or involuntary – of the motivations for not returning to work. Second, we attempt to evaluate whether the likelihood of Italian mothers to leave or lose their jobs and the factors affecting these probabilities changed between 2005 and 2012. Our results confirm human capital investments and job characteristics to be among the main determinants of women’s employment continuity after childbearing. The probability of losing a job increased significantly for mothers in 2012 compared to 2005, probably as a result of the deterioration of labour market conditions during the recession years. Conversely, the probability of leaving a job was not statistically significantly related to the year; family characteristics - the presence of a couple and features of the partner’s job - were key factors in women’s deciding not to return to work after childbearing.
Highlights
The interrelationship between fertility and women‟s employment has long been debated
As expected, working in the public sector and having a permanent contract were both protective factors for women‟s employment continuity
Women working in the public sector with a fixed-term contract had higher probabilities of not returning to work than those working in the public sector with a permanent position, suggesting that contract duration plays a more relevant role in favouring employment continuity among mothers
Summary
The interrelationship between fertility and women‟s employment has long been debated. Institutions and policies oriented towards the reconciliation of work and family, such as parental leave, childcare provision, and access to part-time employment, have been shown to be much less widespread in Southern European lowest-low fertility countries (e.g. Del Boca at al., 2009). The existence of a strong work-family conflict in Italy appears to be confirmed by the distance between ideal and realized family size: does Italy show one of the largest positive discrepancies between desired and actual fertility, but it is the only European country where women aged 25–39 years reported a higher intended number of children than actual children This gap is large among highly educated women, who generally show lower actual fertility levels but higher intentions than less-educated women (Testa, 2012)
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