Employment and Fertility Rates in US Female-Dominated Industries

Michael Betz , The Ohio State University

Historically, places with higher female labor force participation have had lower fertility rates (Hazan and Zoabi 2015). As female employment became more common in the 1970s and 1980s, this relationship has flipped and is now negative for most developed countries (Doepke et al. 2023). Most studies approach this issue from a cross-country perspective and only establish descriptive evidence (Oshio 2019). We take a subnational approach and use regional variation in US industry composition to determine whether places where female-dominated industries constituted a higher proportion of the local labor market experienced lower fertility rates when exogenous national demand shocks to female-dominated industries caused them to expand. We also determine relative importance of male versus female dominated employment growth on county-level fertility rates. We do this using proprietary county-level employment data with information about 4-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) industry employment in combination with restricted birth data from the National Centers for Health Statistics (NCHS) to establish causal evidence of the relationship between local female job growth and fertility. Finally, we test for heterogeneity between 2001-2010 and 2011-2020 to determine whether this relationship is weakening across time.

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 Presented in Session P1. Families, Fertility, and the Life Course 1