How Workplace Resources Impact Women's Fertility in East Asian Countries: Taiwan as an Example

Po-Chun Huang, University of California, Davis

Compared to men, women encounter more difficulties in pursuing career success and having children simultaneously. Research shows that women are often forced to trade the decision to become a mother for career success. This paper focuses on examining whether jobs which provide more resources assist working mothers in balancing their work and family lives. Answering this question may shed light on how various resources in different occupations affect women’s willingness to having children. From the policy perspective, determining the relationship between women’s work and childbearing plans is the key to deferring or reversing fertility decline. Most intriguingly, the results of this paper show that although women in the public sector in Taiwan have more employment related resources, they tend to have fewer births than their counterparts in other sectors. This implies that generous labor policies may sometimes fail to encourage female workers to have more children in East Asian countries.