Employment and child care strategies among Mexican women with young children

Abstract

This paper describes the child care strategies for urban Mexican women, and analyzes how these interact with employment decisions. Data on both the supply and use of public day care show that access to formal facilities is very limited. Those Mexican women who would use these services if they were available must develop creative strategies in order to combine work with family life. When they do work, these women choose flexible and informal sector Jobs, and rely on friends and family members as sources of child care in order to accommodate the dual roles of motherhood and work. Results from simple and bivariate probit regressions support these hypotheses. They suggest that the presence of children has a strong negative impact on the probability that women work, as well as on both the probability of having a formal sector job and of working part-time. The results on the presence of a mother substitute indicate that having a potential caretaker in the household increases the probability of participating in the labor market, decreases the probability of being employed in the formal sector, and increases the likelihood of full-time work. The empirical análisis is based on the 1987 National Survey of Fertility and Health, the National Income and Expenditure Surveys of 1989 and 1992, data from the Mexican Social Security Institute and three rounds of the National Survey of Urban Emplyment from the second trimesters of 1987, 1991 and 1995.