Childbearing or Working?—Impact of Childbirth on Rural Women’s Interruption of Off-farm Employment

To assess the work interruption information and examine the correlation between childbirth and the off-farm employment interruption of rural women, this article collected 3 820 women’s childbirth and employment information over the past 18 years (1998-2015), using multivariate regression to explore the impact of female individual, family and employment characteristics on probability of employment interruption and duration of interruption. Results indicated that overall, 40% of women got interrupted after childbirth in rural areas and the average duration of interruption was about 4 years. Human capital factors, such as their work experience, first childbirth age and education experience, influence the probability of employment interruption, but these factors do not extend the duration of interruption for women who got interrupted. It is concluded that increasing the human capital of rural women is helpful to increasing their labor force participation rate after childbirth