An Investigation of the Relationship Among Occupational Opportunities for Women, Marriage, and Fertility (open access)

An Investigation of the Relationship Among Occupational Opportunities for Women, Marriage, and Fertility

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship among the following variables: occupational opportunities for women, career participation, percentage married by specific age groups, and fertility. The areal units of analysis are the one-hundred largest standard metropolitan statistical areas in the United States in 1970. The independent variables are occupational opportunities for women and career participation of women, and the dependent variables are percentage married by specific age groups and fertility. The objectives are (1) to substantiate earlier findings that there is a negative relationship between occupational opportunities for women and fertility, (2) to include career participation as one dimension of occupational opportunities for women, (3) to compare the relationship and predictive ability of occupational opportunities for women and career participation in terms of the dependent variables of percentage married by specific age groups during regression analysis in order to determine its influence on fertility, and (4) to test propositions concerning the assumption that female labor-force participation does not necessarily inhibit fertility. The findings of the study indicate that there is a negative correlation between occupational opportunities for women and the percentage married by specific age groups and a negative correlation between work opportunities and fertility. Specifically, female-median …
Date: May 1977
Creator: Ross, Patricia A.
System: The UNT Digital Library