Women’s Work Transitions Around

There is little known about the extent to which Australian women leave work on commencement of childbearing or return to work afterwards. Of particular interest is whether or not women return to full-time or part-time work. This paper uses work histories collected in Waves 1 and 2 of the Negotiating the Life Course (NLC) Surveys to analyse these transitions for women who had at least one child since 1970. The analysis focuses first on the transition that occurs when the first child is born, using multinomial logistic regression. It then focuses on the return to work —looking at whether it occurs and if so, on the timing and whether it is to full-time or part-time work, using discrete time event history analysis. The multivariate analyses consider, amongst other things, whether there have been changes over time, and the effect of education, marital status and pre-birth job characteristics. * Australian Institute of Family Studies