An Ongoing Gender Revolution in Europe: Women's Stable Employment as a Precondition for Partnered First Births

The literature on the micro-level gendered associations between employment and fertility in couples has presented a mixed picture, contrasting a uniformly positive association of employment and first birth for men with negative, zero, or positive associations for women. Differences in period, country context, and women's educational level have been proposed as explanations for the ambiguous findings. We attempted to resolve these differences and explanations by estimating the employment associations for co-residential different-sex couples' first birth in 24 European countries using the 2004-2017 waves of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) panel survey. We paid particular attention to the stability of women's pre-conception employment. We found that having both the woman and man full-time, full-year employed was associated with a higher first-birth risk relative to only the man full-time, full-year employed ("male-breadwinner") and relative to neither the woman nor the man full-time, full-year employed. Women's full-time, full-year employment across two pre-conception years was strongly positively associated with the risk of first birth for women's low-, medium-, and high-educational-attainment groups. The association of women's full-time, full-year employment with first birth was positive not only overall, but also separately for Western-, Eastern-, and Southern-European country groups. These findings suggest that women's stable full-time employment may be a general precondition for initiating parenthood among European couples.

The online version contains supplementary material available at10.1007/s11113-026-09990-6.