Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Women who have earned at least a master’s degree are less likely to forgo having a family than they were in the past, and are choosing to have more kids than their mothers and grandmothers, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
In their analysis of newly released US Census Bureau data, Pew found that 60 percent of women who have earned at least a master’s degree had two or more children (an increase of nine percent since 1994), while only 22 percent of highly-educated females had no children (down about eight percent over the past 11 years, according to the researchers behind the report).
Women with advanced degrees who had two children increased four percent, they added, while those with three or more had increased by six percentage points. Pew noted that the trend seems to coincide with women’s growing presence in managerial and leadership positions, and that this phenomenon is influencing the issue of work-family balance.
Childlessness down in US, but education gap remains
According to the research group, previous studies have found that with each child a woman has, she devotes fewer hours to paid employment. The average, childless working-age female spends 27 hours per week on-the-job, they said, while a woman with three or more children spends only 18 hours at work. They are also three-times more likely as working fathers to state that being a working parent has made it more difficult to advance in their career field.
While the data clearly shows that highly-educated women are less likely to be childless and more likely to have larger families, the findings are not as clear when looking at less-educated females, Pew said. Women who did not graduate from high school and those who have bachelor’s degrees are less likely to be childless than in 1994, but otherwise the data remains largely unchanged.
Among high school graduates, the share of women 40 to 44 years of age with one child is on the rise, but there has been no change in the share with bigger families. Overall, childlessness among all US women between these ages is at its lowest point in a decade, according to Pew.
“The educational ‘gaps’ in childlessness and in family size have narrowed in the past two decades, but they do persist,” the group added. “The more education a woman has, up to a bachelor’s degree, the less likely she is to become a mother. And among mothers, those with more education have fewer children than those with less education.”
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