Motives for Combining Motherhood with Employment: Evidence for Medium and Highly Educated Polish Women Around the EU Accession

Anna Matysiak and Mynarska Monika
Additional contact information
Mynarska Monika: Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland

Central European Economic Journal, 2021, vol. 8, issue 55, 63-78

Abstract: This article provides insights into employment decisions of mothers and mothers-to-be in a post-socialist Poland around the entry to the EU. Previous studies for this country continuously pointed to a strong determination among mothers to be employed during the economic transformation, despite increasing obstacles to combining paid work with childrearing over the 1990s. We analyse in-depth interviews to explore women's motives to work for pay. We investigate how these motives are related to women's childbearing experiences and intentions. Our analyses show that motherhood was central in women's lives at this point in Polish history, but females sought to combine it with employment. We also find that women's perceptions about their ability to balance work and motherhood were strongly related to the meanings that they attached to paid work.

Keywords: fertility; women's labour force participation; motives for work; qualitative interviews; transition economies; Central and Eastern Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/ceej-2021-0005 (text/html)

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:vrs:ceuecj:v:8:y:2021:i:55:p:63-78:n:6

DOI: 10.2478/ceej-2021-0005

Access Statistics for this article

Central European Economic Journal is currently edited by Anna Matysiak

More articles in Central European Economic Journal from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().