Children and Female Employment in Mongolia

99 Pages Posted: 22 Aug 2019 Last revised: 8 Jun 2023

See all articles by Elena Nikolova

Elena Nikolova

Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI); University College London - School of Slavonic and East European Studies; IOS Regensburg

Jakub Polansky

University of Sussex, School of Global Studies; University of Sussex - Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU)

Date Written: August 20, 2019

Abstract

Although a large body of literature has argued that motherhood has a profound and long-lasting negative effect on the employment and earnings of women, there is little evidence focusing on the post-communist region. This paper exploits the latest round of the EBRD-World Bank Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) and of the Mongolian National Statistics Office Household Socio-Economic Survey (HSES) to examine the correlation between the presence of children of different age categories in a family and female employment in Mongolia in 2016. We examine the availability of childcare, social norms and attitudes towards women, as well as household decision-making as potential explanations. We find that small children decrease the probability of female employment relative to women with no small children. In particular, women with two children aged one to six years are 21.5 percentage points less likely to be employed. Our results also suggest that cultural biases against women may be – at least partially – responsible for the low female employment levels which we uncovered. These results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias.

Keywords: children, female employment, Mongolia, women

JEL Classification: J16, J13, J20

Suggested Citation

Nikolova, Elena and Nikolova, Elena and Polansky, Jakub, Children and Female Employment in Mongolia (August 20, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3440065 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3440065

Elena Nikolova (Contact Author)

Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI) ( email )

Zvolenská 29
Bratislava, 82109
Slovakia

University College London - School of Slavonic and East European Studies ( email )

Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
United Kingdom

IOS Regensburg ( email )

Landshuter Str. 4
Regensburg, 93047
Germany

Jakub Polansky

University of Sussex, School of Global Studies ( email )

Brighton
United Kingdom

University of Sussex - Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) ( email )

Brighton, BN1 9SL
United Kingdom

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