Abstract
Swedish women have become more and more inclined to take up part-time work when they return to the labour market after the first birth. There has been a parallel development in the tendency to reduce working hours among one-child mothers who initially take full-time jobs when they return to market work. Consequently, full-time work has become more transitory among one-child mothers. Conversely, one-child mothers who work part-time tend to stick to this arrangement until it is time for the next child. The length of work experience prior to first birth is positively related to part-time work. Somehow, an ‘established’ position in the labour market seems to be a prerequisite for both getting and keeping a part-time job after childbirth. There is also a dimension which is captured either by education or by social background (two factors clearly related to each other). A high level of education or ‘upper middle class’ background is associated with a disinclination to work part-time. Fairly extended work interruptions (of a year or so) in connection with childbirth combined with part-time work seem to constitute a new strategy, which might be called the ‘combination strategy’. This way of organizing life after starting motherhood seems to have attracted the kind of women who previously tended toward the ‘homemaker strategy’ and the kind who in earlier times would have pursued a clearcut ‘career strategy’.
Résumé
Les Suèdoises, qui se replaçaient sur le marché du travail après leur première naissance, ont été de plus en plus tentées par le travail à temps partiel. Parallèlement, les mères d'enfant unique, qui avaient avant cette naissance un travail à plein temps, tendent à réduire leur durée de travail lorsqu'elles reprennent leur activité. Il en résulte que le travail à plein temps devient de plus en plus transitoire pour ces femmes. Réciproquement, les mères d'un enfant qui travaillent à temps partiel tendent à maintenir cette situation jusqu'à la naissance de leur second enfant. Plus la durée de travail avant la première naissance est importante, plus ces femmes prendront à la suite un travail à temps partiel. De toutes façons, une position ‘bien établie’ sur le marché du travail semble être une condition indispensable pour à la fois obtenir et garder un travail à temps partiel après la naissance. Une autre caractéristique, saisie par le niveau d'éducation ou par les origines sociales (deux facteurs clairement reliés entre eux), joue également: un niveau d'éducation élevé ou une origine dans la ‘haute bourgeoisie’ sont associés dans le rejet du travail à temps partiel. Des interruptions de travail assez longues (d'environ une année), reliées à la naissance de l'enfant et combinées à un travail à temps partiel, semblent constituer une nouvelle stratégie, que l'on peut appeler une ‘stratégie combinée’. Cette façon d'organiser la vie après le début de la maternité semble avoir attiré tant les femmes qui par le passé se dirigeaient vers la ‘stratégie du retour au foyer’, que celles qui par le passé auraient poursuivi une ‘stratégie de carrière’ bien tranchée.
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This paper is part of the documentation of a recently completed research project at the Section pf Demography, University of Stockholm. The project was called ‘Life cycle phases of Swedish women: A study of education, labour force participation and childbearing among Swedish women born 1936–60’. The project was financed by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Delegation for Social Research. Statistics Sweden kindly granted access to anonymized data from the Swedish Fertility Survey of 1981. I wish to thank my colleagues at the Section of Demography for useful comments and stimulating discussions at the various stages of the research. I am particularly grateful to the project leader, Jan M. Hoem, for valuable methodological and editorial advice.
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Eva Bernhardt, M. The choice of part-time work among Swedish one-child mothers. Eur J Population 4, 117–144 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796925
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796925