London - For any woman who dreams of starting a family, finding the right job could be just as important as finding the right man.
The longer a woman spends in temporary employment, the more likely she is to be childless aged 35, according to a study.
So a steady job could actually improve her chances of motherhood rather than encourage her to delay it.
And the researchers said the finding held true irrespective of the woman’s social background.
Just over two-thirds of women have at least one child by their mid-30s. But the likelihood of becoming a mother by 35 was eight percent lower for those who had done one year of casual work, the Australian study found.
And women who had experienced five years of temporary employment were a third more likely to be childless.
Researchers said the study indicates that women want to achieve financial stability before opting to have a child, regardless of family wealth or partner’s income.
Lead researcher Professor Vivienne Moore, from the University of Adelaide, said: “Our findings suggest that, regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, women generally aspire to economic security prior to starting a family.
“This finding is important because it challenges the pervasive media representations of delayed childbirth as a phenomenon arising from highly educated women choosing to delay motherhood to focus on their careers.”
The researchers suggested the discovery could also lead to governments developing family-friendly policies which help couples become financially secure before they conceive, rather than offering assistance after they have children.
The research, published in the journal Human Reproduction, looked at 663 Australian women who were born between 1973 and 1975 in a hospital in Adelaide.
They were interviewed when they reached their mid-30s and asked about significant life events such as relationships, childbirth and employment from the age of 15 onwards. Co-author Dr Lynne Giles said: “Our results showed that 61 percent of women who had received a university education had at least one casual job after achieving their first qualification, and 30 percent of these jobs were managerial or professional.
“This highlights the fact that temporary employment is no longer the sole domain of low-skilled, poorly paid people.
“Our results also show that having children at an older age and childlessness are not just a matter of individual women’s choices. They reflect the broader structural arrangements in society.
“These over-arching determinants deserve more attention and study so that we can better understand the barriers to family formation.”
The study concluded: “Current policy responses generally provide financial and other support to parents after they have children; there remains a need to develop complementary policies to facilitate the ability of couples to commit to family formation.
“Since all socioeconomic groups are implicated, we suggest that upstream labour market reforms could be considered in order to remove barriers to child-bearing.”
In 2011, separate research showed that four out of ten working women in their 20s intended to put off having children because of “financial worries”. Nearly a third of working women in their 30s also said they were considering delaying having children or extending their family for money reasons. - Daily Mail