Women's Employment Transitions Around Childbearing

The dynamics of women’s labour supply are examined at a crucial stage of the life-cycle. This paper uses the longitudinal employment history records for 3,893 33-year-old mothers in the 5th sweep of the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort. Models of binary recurrent events are estimated which correct for unobserved heterogeneity, using SABRE software. These models focus (a) on women’s first transition from first childbirth until the interview and (b) on all the monthly transitions. Evidence of a polarization was found between highly-educated, high-wage mothers and lower-educated, low-wage mothers.