Introduction

Everywhere, education is a strong discriminator of women's labour market supply and types of family–work combination. As discussed in Chapter Two, it gives access to higher job positions and wages, it mediates attitudes and identities and it furnishes greater bargaining power in adopting ‘preferred’ choices. Moreover, everywhere a woman's allocation of time between paid and unpaid work is negotiated within the household, and, because of either cognitive or instrumental rationality, it is influenced by her partner's symbolic and material resources. However, variations across countries in the link between education, motherhood and participation are still wide. This chapter focuses precisely on the family–work nexus and on its variation according first to the woman's education, and then to her partner's education and class. Do women with low educations behave differently from those with high educations when they get married or become mothers? In particular, is motherhood a social leveller, or does education overcome motherhood's typically negative effect on participation? Do women married to high-educated or high-class men behave differently from those whose husbands have a lower educational and occupational profile? And how has all this changed across generations?

Education and types of work history

Descriptive evidence

As evidenced by Figure 3.2, Italy records one of the widest gaps in participation between poorly educated and highly educated women in Europe. By using cross-sectional data, Bettio and Villa (1996, 2000) have found that nine out of 10 top-educated Italian women aged 20-39 are in the labour force when they do not have children. The participation rates of their lower-educated counterparts diminish by roughly a third. Motherhood reduces participation to a lesser extent, depending on the mother's level of education. While highly educated Italian women with children aged under 14 record a participation rate that is only six percentage points lower than that of highly educated childless women, low-educated mothers reduce their activity rates by 22 percentage points compared with their childless counterparts (Bettio and Villa, 1996, 2000). Indeed, in comparative terms, Italy also records one of the lowest child effects. Among less than upper-secondary-educated women, 55% with children, against 62% without children, were in continuous employment during the period 1994-98.