Women Education and Family Perspective
Category : Women Business, Women Lifestyle, Women Personality
The age at which a woman first marries is directly related to the number of children she will bear because it affects the length of time she will be at risk of becoming pregnant.
Of course, unmarried women may also have children, but the vast majority of childbearing takes place within marriage throughout most of the world, which makes the age at marriage a valuable indicator of a woman’s lifetime fertility.
The total fertility rate — or average births per woman — for German women, who marry around age 24, is 1.3. Conversely, women in Chad, who marry earlier, average 7 children. Within countries, rural women tend to marry earlier than urban women and tend to have larger families. Access to contraception is an important contributor to the differences in the fertility rates among countries, but culture and socioeconomics weigh heavily as well.
Women’s access to education, health care, family planning, and employment all affect family size. Studies show that women who have completed primary school have fewer children than those with no education. Education is key because educated women are more likely to know what social, community, and health services, including family planning, are available and to have the confidence to use them. In addition, women with more education have more opportunities outside the home and can see the benefits of education for their children. Women who achieve a relatively high level of education are also more likely to enter the labor force before they marry or begin childbearing, and ultimately to have smaller families than women who marry in their teens. This trend is evident in almost every country where data are available. As the chart “Women’s education and family size” shows, women with a secondary school education have substantially smaller families than women with less education.
Evidence shows that efforts to lower birth rates may depend on improving the status of women. Part of the Cairo Programme of Action, developed at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, calls for universal access to education, employment opportunities for women, and an end to discrimination against women. Experiences in some countries have shown that fertility patterns can change in as little as a decade, and that voluntary policies and programs can be highly effective in encouraging the change.
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