The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China focuses on reducing the costs of childbirth,child-rearing,and education,proposing an active population development strategy of"optimizing the population development strategy and establishing a supporting policy system for child-birth".This marks an important measure for China to achieve long-term and balanced population develop-ment,pointing the direction and clarifying the goals of future childbirth supporting policies.Fertility and employment are major life events throughout women's life journey.The Chinese fertility policies remain at"ultra-low fertility levels"during the transition from birth control to fertility encouragement.Meanwhile,the female employment participation rate in China has basically remained at approximately 62%since 2017.Women strive to find a balance between work and family in the game of fertility and employment trade-offs.It is urgent to establish a diversified,moderate and inclusive related system for supporting fertil-ity policy adjustment.This paper adopts the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA)method to compare 38 OECD member countries'fertility support policy groups from the perspective of promoting female employment,and analyze the effects of fertility support policies in different employment contexts.By analyzing female employment behavior choice,anti-sexism culture,and labor market supervision and inspection strength as female employment scenarios in OECD countries,and maternity support policy system,maternity time support,maternity economic support,and maternity service support are selected for necessity analysis and group analysis.It is found that individual employment scenarios and fertility support policies do not represent necessary conditions for active policy effects.As a result,five types of policy configurations that can promote fertility levels are identified,which indicates that there are multiple ways to achieve policy effects under different female employment scenarios and fertility policies.In order to accelerate the construction of a"fertility-friendly"social environment and promote high-quality female employment,Chinese fertility support policies should integrate the dual functions of promoting fertility and supporting female employment.
Fertility Support PoliciesFemale EmploymentFertility LevelFsQCA
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
