Roles of Socio-economic Environments on the Relationship between Number of Children and Maternal Employment in Indonesia

Abstract

Incompatibility between child-rearing and maternal employment has been assumed to result in a negative relationship between number of children and maternal employment. The higher the degree of incompatibility, the stronger is the negative correlation. In other words, the degree of this incompatibility affects the sign and magnitude of the relationship between number of children and maternal employment. However, existing studies have not considered whether the relationship varies by the mother’s socioeconomic environment. This paper fills this gap by using three Indonesian data sets: 2015 socio-economic survey to obtain individual variables, 2014 village potential survey to have socio-economic environments at the village level, and published data to measure socio-economic environments at the district level. It uses a logistic regression with maternal employment as the dependent variable and two main independent variables: number of children and a set of socioeconomic environment variables. The impact of socio-economic environments is seen by examining the coefficients of interaction between socio-economic environments and number of children. The empirical results show that the relationship depends on the indicators used to measure the socio-economic environments Some indicators of socio-economic environments strengthen the relationship, some weaken, and some do not have any impact.