Female Work Participation and Fertility in a Philippine Setting : A Test of Alternative Models

This paper reports on research exploring the relationship between female work participation and fertility in the Philippine setting. One innovation of this research is the collection of household survey data which includes information, unavailable in past Philippine data sets, on the work and fertility histories of currently married women, and on social, economic, demographic and socio-psychological factors associated with female work participation and fertility. This unique data set provided an opportunity to test alternative models suggested by the most recent literature on the topic. Joint and simultaneous determination models were tested to examine their relationship under three different perspectives: past, current and birth intervals. The overall result seems to suggest that relationship between female work participation and fertility is spurious whether these variables are viewed in the cumulative, current or birth interval contexts. Their correlation can be explained by their dependence on a common set of determinants. Among the more significant determinants are the potential earnings of the husband and the wife. These variables generally tend to reduce completed or current fertility and to lengthen the intervals of the higher order births among high parity women. They have opposite effects, however on female work participation: husband's potential earnings generally reduces, while wife's potential earnings generally increases participation. Another set of significant determinants are the socio-psychological variables, especially the normative orientations of the household as reflected by the husband's attitude toward female work. A husband's unfavorable attitude toward his wife's working away from home consistently reduces the wife's current work participation. These tentative results suggest that policies and programs to expand female employment in such settings as those that characterize Misamis Oriental Province, the site of the research, will probably have very little direct contribution to fertility reduction. Encouraging female employment, therefore, can best be pursued to meet its more traditional objectives of increasing family income and the economic participation of women in development. Female employment, however, could ultimately affect fertility indirectly via its effect on family income and on normative orientations regarding female roles. Studies examining these indirect mechanisms are therefore, encouraged.