Partnership and Employment Pathways to Childlessness in Spain

The very first issue of Perspectives Demogràfiques, published in 2016 (Esteve et al., 2016) forecasted that 25% to 30% of women born in the second half of the 1970s would remain childless in Spain. Today, these cohorts have completed their reproductive years, allowing us to study the circumstances under which these women have remained permanently childless. Using the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey, we explore how employment and relationship trajectories influence childlessness among women in Spain. This study is led by the Gender and Inequality group at the Centre for Demographic Studies, part of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. First, we describe the interconnections between partnership and labor-market trajectories to identify typical life-course pathways. These trajectories have been generated through statistical techniques that allow the identification of natural groups within a dataset, based on how strongly associated they are. Second, we assess the likelihood of remaining childless after age 40 among the different groups identified in the previous step. Finally, we examine educational differences in the patterns observed. The results show that 28% of women born between 1962 and 1978 did not have children at the time of the survey. However, this percentage varies depending on partnership and employment trajectories, as well as educational level. The probability of being childless exceeds 50% among women who have not had a partner, especially among university-educated women, for whom the figure rises above 80%. In contrast, among women who married early, the proportion without children is below 20%