Gender empowerment as an enforcer of individuals’ choice between education and fertility: Evidence from 19th century France

Abstract

Recent theoretical developments of growth models, especially on unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off has been a central element of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to sustained growth. Using a unique census-based dataset, this article explores the role of gender on the trade-off between education and fertility across 86 French counties during the nineteenth century, as an empirical extension of Perrin (2013, 2019a). We first test the existence of the child quantity-quality trade-off in 1851. Second, we explore the long-run effect of education on fertility from a gendered approach. Two important results emerge: (i) significant and negative association between education and fertility is found, and (ii) such a relationship is non-uniform over the distribution of education/fertility. While our results suggest the existence of a negative and significant effect of the female endowments in human capital on the fertility transition, the effects of negative endowment almost disappear at a low level of fertility.

Religion, Ideology and Fertility

“…A reverse causality-based endogeneity is also possible. For example, in contexts where fertility is higher, gender traditional gender roles might tend to gain strength as, in the presence of gender asymmetries in the division of labour in household tasks (particularly childrearing), mothers tend to bear higher costs in terms of participation to the labour market (Lebediski et al, 2023;Kleven et al, 2019), education (Diebolt et al, 2021) and participation to political life (Sommer, 2018). This is likely to reinforce stereotypes of gender roles and, consequently, individualsʼ attitudes toward gender inequality.…”