The Impact of Labor on Family Life
By Amenda Lam, Hsiang-Ning Chen, and Nhu Nguyen
How can we understand the impact of labor on family life?
For years, the United States has seen a steady decline in fertility rates with “2019 being a record low as there were only 58.3 births for every 1000 women between the ages of 15–44” (Pew Research Center). Many theories behind the cause for this exist, which range from the quality of work-life balance, environmental factors such as global warming, and the prevalent use of birth control are all contributing factors to declining birth rates. To better understand how factors such as one’s relationship to their labor, it’s worthwhile to explore how labor laws have shifted the ways Americans work and live with one another. In America, it was only 1920 since it was legally binding for places of employment to compensate women with equal wages to men and provide them with opportunities for work. Despite legislative enforcement, it was only in 2020 that women began making close to what men make, at 98 cents for every $1 that a man makes. The year prior, it was 79 cents for every $1. While the struggle for equal pay continues on the front-side, the pressures of being a part of an organizational workforce can also hold back people from feeling confident enough to form families. The implications of work-life balance on people, marriage, and childbearing can be explored through the culture of branding men as breadwinners of households. As more women are being employed, at increasing higher rates with medicine being an example of this increase in the female workforce it means that more women are becoming breadwinners of their families. Furthermore, as it’s more often the case that children are raised in single households or households where both parents work the reality is that less quality time is spent on raising children.
More and more people are choosing to be childless nowadays. According to Pew Research Center, the number of women who are voluntarily childless has been rising over the years (2010). Although there are many potential contributing factors, it is commonly believed that many people are voluntarily childless due to the high cost of raising children. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raising a kid from birth to 18 year old would cost approximately $233,610 dollars in 2015. Assuming that the high cost of raising children has a direct impact on people’s willingness to have children, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the average income per capita has been decreasing over the years, which is why people can no longer afford having as many children as they used to. With that being said, as we observe a decline in average birth rate over years, we should also be seeing a decrease in the average GDP.
Figure 1: GDP Growth Rate vs Birth Rate
The graph above compares the average GDP growth rate and birth rate. The growth in average birth rate is represented by the blue line and the average GDP growth rate is represented by the orange line. As shown in the graph, the GDP has been constantly increasing, besides the year of 2009. On the other hand, the growth in the average birth rate has always been negative. As the GDP increases, we would have expected that people are able to afford having more children than ever. However, by observing the patterns shown in the graph, there seems to be no clear relationship between the growth in GDP and birth rate; we did not observe a growth in birth rate along with the growth of GDP. This rejects the hypothesis that the decreasing birth rate is due to people not being able to afford raising children anymore.
To further investigate the economic impact on birth rate, we break down the data into countries to see how birth rate varies across countries of different levels of GDP.
Figure 2: GDP vs Birth Rate by country
In Figure 2, the countries’ birth rates are encoded by five different shades of blue: the darker the color, the higher the birth rate. Above each country, there is a grey circle. Each country’s GDP level is indicated by the size of the circle, smaller circle for lower GDP to facilitate the understanding of both the large-scale and small-scale features of the data (Ware, 2004). From this visualization, we can immediately notice that most countries colored in the lightest shade of blue have relatively large circles on it. On the other hand, countries with the darkest shade of blue are paired with small circles. Our initial hypothesis is that the financial impact of having children is what causes a decline in birth rate, which suggests that wealthier countries are more likely to have a higher birth rate. However, this data reveals the opposite of our hypothesis. Countries with lower GDP levels actually have higher birth rates than countries with higher GDP.
The patterns shown in the above visualization proves that GDP and birth rates are associated. However, this does not explain the causal relationship between the two variables.
So what is causing the low birth rate?
With evidence from the visualization and previous research, the relationship between GDP levels and birth rates across countries seem to have some form of an inverse correlation. But what factors are contributing to this phenomenon? In order to find an explanation to this relationship, we need to find common patterns while looking at the characteristics of countries with low GDP and high birth rates. One of the commonalities regarding this change was education alongside women empowerment. On both a social and individual level, a great number of studies confirm the association of higher educated women with lower fertility (Roser, 2017). As we can see with the visualization below, there is an inversely correlated relationship with women’s educational attainment and number of children per woman. Each arrow in the visualization shows the average number of children per woman (y-axis) and years of education of women (x-axis) in the reproductive age has changed in their respective country. With this, we see that countries like Niger with the highest reported fertility rates have women with very minimal access to education.
Figure 3: Women’s educational attainment vs. # of children per woman by country
From Roser, in both historical and current episodes of a declining trend in fertility rates, researchers have found adequate evidence that better education makes it possible for social norms to change, therefore reducing the number of children that parents desire (2017). Amartya Sen elaborated on this in his book, ‘Development As Freedom,’ where he discussed India’s influence by public decision and the “(negative) effects of high fertility rates on the lives of young women and also on the community at large,” (1999). Sen explains how the high level of female literacy contributes to encouraging social and political dialogue for women. Additionally, this leads to feedback through learning about contraceptives and women’s reproductive health. Education has an effect on lower birth rates, but birth rates also have an effect on access to education, especially in this area. Women who are more educated reduce the gap between the desired and the actual number of children conceived, so the knowledge and availability for modern contraceptives is integral in making fertility reduction possible (Roser, 2017). Here, we explore this realm of accessibility to contraceptives by looking at average health expenditures from several countries and their relationship to their respective average infant mortality rate.
Figure 4: Global Average Health Expenditure vs. Average Infant Mortality Rate
Our visual attributes in this graph clearly indicate the individual impact each country aligns in comparison to other countries represented through the visual marks instead of being geographically oriented for a better understanding of the relationship between the two elements of health expenditures and infant mortality rates (Heer & Shneiderman, 2012). Looking at the data visualization, we see that countries like Angola and Barbados have especially higher infant mortality rates with lower average health expenditures. Funding for health services, nutrition activities, emergency aid, etc. is incredibly important to a sustainable family life. So in this case where women are not supported for their endeavors (with or without knowing the expectancy of a child), then the results of conceiving a child could potentially be very detrimental.
So what’s the main takeaway from this?
First and foremost, having a family is hard. There are a plethora of decisions and steps that you need to consider when having a child, especially as it directly impacts every part of your life and the lives around you. With the data collected and evidence provided, we know that the decreasing trend in not having children isn’t due to the lack of financial resources and lack of support being unable to provide for the family. As we observed the data in fertility rates dropping and modernization of nations rising, it’s clear to see that this impact is due to women’s roles in society and their access to proper education/healthcare. The government’s support and funding towards healthcare and education have a significant performance in fertility rates and explains why underdeveloped countries tend to have more children while wealthier countries have less children on average. This finding comes with important consequences. Without the support for women empowerment, certain countries will face rapid population change affecting the economical and societal standards of living.
References
The Cost of Raising a Child. USDA. (2020, February 18). https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-child.
Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Interactive dynamics for visual analysis. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 45–54.
Livingston, G., & Cohn, D. V. (2020, July 31). Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/06/25/childlessness-up-among-all-women-down-among-women-with-advanced-degrees/.
Max Roser (2017) — “Fertility Rate”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate'
Sen, Amartya, 1999-. (2000). Development as Freedom. New York :Anchor Books,
Ware, Colin. 2004. Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Burlington: Elsevier.