Children and female employment in Mongolia

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Economic Systems

Publication Date

1-1-2022

Abstract

Although a large body of literature has argued that motherhood has a profound and long-lasting negative effect on the employment and earnings of women, there is little evidence focusing on the post-communist region. This paper exploits the latest rounds of the EBRD-World Bank Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) and the Mongolian National Statistics Office Household Socio-Economic Survey (HSES) to examine the correlation between the presence of children of different age categories in a family and female employment in Mongolia in 2016. We examine the availability of childcare, social norms and attitudes towards women, as well as household decision-making as potential explanations. We find that small children decrease the probability of female employment relative to women with no small children. In particular, women with two children aged one to six years are 21.5 percentage points less likely to be employed. Our results also suggest that cultural biases against women may be at least partially responsible for the low female employment levels we uncovered. These results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias.

ISSN

0939-3625

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Disciplines

Business

Keywords

Children, Female employment, Mongolia, Women

Scopus ID

85136277407

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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