Women may not find it easy to “have it all” but new research suggests that highly educated women have found a way to have more – more kids that is.
According to a study to be published in The Economic Journal, women with advanced degrees are having more children than they have in the last three decades.
Economists Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi studied Americans’ fertility rates and compared them to women’s levels of education and found that while women with some form of college education have largely plateaued in their rates of childbirth over the last 30 years, women with advanced degrees have risen by more than 50 per cent.
This smaller subset of highly educated women have experienced a jump from having 1.2 children on average in 1980 to having an average of 1.96 children today.
So what’s the reason behind the boost in babies?
According to The Guardian, the research suggests that people with advanced degrees tend to have higher incomes so they can afford to have kids and work at the same time.
“By substituting their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more children and work longer hours,” the study’s authors wrote.
Gail Kelly
Another possible influencer is that the partners of highly educated women are more likely to be willing to embrace a less traditional family dynamic and help share the responsibilities of raising a family. Also researchers suggest the concept of a male breadwinner isn’t so fixed as perhaps it is with the partners of less-educated women.
The authors also deduce that those in a higher socio-economic bracket can extend their childbearing years as they can afford fertility technologies to help them conceive later in life once they have collected all of those diplomas.
There is also evidence to suggest that employers could also become the new catalyst for a further rise in high achieving women having more babies.
Recently large companies like Facebook and Apple have included subsidies in fertility technologies for employees in order to attract highly educated career driven women into their ranks.
