It is well-documented that women have lower incomes after having children. However, access to birth control has allowed women to delay pregnancy, granting them time to find better partners, and increase their educational attainment and labor market attachment before becoming parents. Between 1970 and 2020, the average age at which women in the United States had their first child rose from 21 to 27 years old. In this paper, the authors study the extent to which delaying pregnancy mitigates the impact of children on women’s careers, and how this varies with the circumstances in which children are born.
Studying the tradeoffs that women face in deciding when to have children is challenging because women may avoid pregnancy at times in their lives when it would be especially disruptive. To overcome this challenge, the authors use health and labor market data from Sweden to study the labor market outcomes of childless Swedish women who become pregnant while using long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).
These methods of birth control are effective, but not perfect: about 1% of women using a LARC will get pregnant in a year, resulting in a natural experiment in which women who had planned to delay childbirth become pregnant earlier than they desired. The authors compare career paths of women who experience an unplanned pregnancy to those who do not but who receive a LARC in the same year and at the same age.
They find the following:
Can planning mitigate these effects? To address this question, the authors also study women at the other end of the planning spectrum: childless women who would like to become pregnant and are undergoing in vitro fertilization procedures (IVF) to do so. In this setting, the authors use quasi-random success of fertilization procedures to estimate the impact of a planned pregnancy. They find the following:
Building on these results, the authors causally identify the impact of shifting the timing of first childbirth. Their approach accounts for the fact that the differences documented above may be due to differences in the rate of abortion versus birth between women in the IVF group versus the LARC group. It also accounts for later planned pregnancies among women who do not have unplanned pregnancies in the LARC group and among women who do not get pregnant in the first IVF attempt in the IVF group. The authors identify the impacts of having children (versus becoming pregnant) in each year after birth, and find the following: