Children and Female Employment in Mongolia

Elena Nikolova () and Jakub Polansky
Additional contact information
Elena Nikolova: Zayed University (College of Interdisciplinary Studies), IOS Regensburg and Global Labor Organization

No 396, Working Papers from Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (Institute for East and Southeast European Studies)

Abstract: Although a large body of literature has argued that motherhood has a profound and longlasting 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 EBRDWorld 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-dev and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/publikationen/wp/wp_396.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ost:wpaper:396

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (Institute for East and Southeast European Studies) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kseniia Gatskova ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).