Female Wage Employment and Fertility in Kenya

Germano Mwabu (), Radu Ban, Joy Mueni Kiiru, Regina Gathoni Mwatha and T. Paul Schultz
Additional contact information
Germano Mwabu: Department of Economics and Development Studies, University of Nairobi, Nairobi P.O. Box 30197-00100, Kenya
Radu Ban: Gates Foundation, 500 5th Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
Joy Mueni Kiiru: Department of Economics and Development Studies, University of Nairobi, Nairobi P.O. Box 30197-00100, Kenya
Regina Gathoni Mwatha: Department of Sociology, Gender and Development Studies, Kenyatta University, Nairobi P.O. Box 43844-00100, Kenya
T. Paul Schultz: Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

Economies, 2025, vol. 13, issue 10, 1-30

Abstract: The paper examines the association between fertility and female wage employment in Kenya using nationally representative cross-sectional data collected by the Kenya’s National Bureau of Statistics, a government-owned statistical organization. Two findings emerge from our analysis. The first finding is that female wage employment is negatively correlated with the number of births. Incompatibility of childrearing with wage employment is one of the main explanations for this evidence. The other finding is a much larger magnitude of the negative association between wage employment and male births relative to female newborns, but the difference in the estimated gender-specific coefficients is statistically insignificant. However, there is need for further significance tests on the difference between the gendered coefficients because the larger drop in the number of male births relative to female, as female wage employment expands, has strong support in the biomedical literature. The relevance of the second finding in the context of the biomedical literature on the link between a child’s gender at birth and the environment in which the mother works and lives provides a justification for further research on this issue. The tentative findings of the paper point to labor market policies that could be explored in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa to address the problem of excess fertility, and thus enhance women’s health, agency, and socioeconomic empowerment.

Keywords: female wage employment; fertility; total births; male and female births; social norms; women’s human capital; endogeneity; sample selection; Heckman; Poisson; generalized residual; Kenya (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E F I J O Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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