The Declining Proportion Of Children In US : Working Mothers And Other Economic Factors

            In the last three decades, various movements in the US have attempted to secure the rights of women to be treated like white, prime age men in various walks of life. While there are still inequalities, major advancements have been achieved in terms of equal opportunity and access to jobs for women. Considerable difficulties in combining continued work force participation with domestic and family responsibilities of women has created a subduing effect on fertility plans among married couples. The overall proportion of married couples with children among all house holds has dropped from 40.3% in 1970 to 25% in 1996 while the average annual hours for paid employment among married women rose by 30% between 1978 and 1999. Meanwhile the mean age for mothers at first birth climbed from 21.4 in 1970 to 24.9 in 2000 and 19 percent of American women 40 to 44 years old were childless in 1998, compared to 10 percent of American women of the same age in 1976 and 1980 and 15 percent of American women of the same age in 1988. [US Census Bureau, 2000: Fertility of American Women]. This paper initially presents what factors led to a substantial growth in women participation in the work force and then analyzes how this phenomenon in addition to other factors of society provide incentives to working parents to remain childless or delay child birth - key factors that has brought down the proportion of children in the population of the US to 26% in 2001 from 36% during the "Baby Boom" era of 1960s [Forum on children and family statistics, 2000: http://www.childstats.gov/ac2002/pdf/pop.pdf].
             The period between 1970 and late 1990s witnessed great strides in the field of participation of women in the labor force. The various civil rights movements in the sphere of feminism had already laid the ground work for striving towards equal status of women and men in the workplace. Growth of service sector jobs, particularly technology and information centric jobs in the latter quarter of the last century was a major factor attracting women to the workplace.