The effect of education level on childlessness among Hungarian women

Ivett Szalma, Corvinus University of Budapest
Judit Takács, Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

In Hungary relatively little is known about childless women, and the factors that might contribute to their remaining childless. The aim of this paper is reveal include whether any patterns of childlessness can be identified according to basic demographic traits (such as gender, age, education, place of residence) and other important personal characteristics (such as religiosity). Our main hypothesis is that women who spend more years in education are more likely to postpone their fertility careers, and less likely to conform to the normative expectation that a “woman needs a child in order to be fulfilled”, being a very strong norm in Hungary. On the basis of these considerations we expect that Hungarian women with the highest levels of education are overrepresented among childless women. The empirical base of our proposed presentation is given by the Hungarian datasets of the Gender and Generation Survey, which were carried out in 2001 and in 2004-5. Logistic regression models will be applied in order to highlight the possible connections between childlessness and educational level. Our dependent variable is a binary variable indicating whether the selected women have given birth between the two waves of GGS data collection. Our control variables will include age, partnership status, settlement type, and gender norm attitudes. Our main outcome variable will be the level of education.