The objective of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between motherhood and
women's labour force participation in South Africa. The key problem in estimating this
relationship is the endogeneity of motherhood/childbearing with respect to women's
labour force participation. Childbearing behaviour and decisions to participate in the
labour force are jointly determined; and unobservable characteristics which influence
childbearing behaviour are also correlated with women's labour force participation. This
thesis shows that the definition of motherhood can exacerbate these sources of
endogeneity bias. International studies typically identify mothers as women with
biological children aged 18 years or younger who are co-resident with at least one of
their children. In South Africa, however, a sizeable sample of women is not co-resident
with their children. The remaining sample of co-resident mothers are a non-random
sample of all mothers who are less likely to participate in the labour force than all
mothers. Placing a co-residency restriction on motherhood therefore biases the
relationship between motherhood/childbearing and labour force participation. In
particular, it overestimates the negative relationship. In the international literature
instrumental variable (IV) estimation has been used to disentangle these causal
mechanisms. This thesis also considers an application of same sex sibling composition,
first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998), as a strategy to identify the exogenous
effects of childbearing on women's labour force participation in South Africa.
Little or no research has investigated this relationship in South Africa. One possible
explanation for this is that studies on female labour force participation in South Africa
have not been able to match women to their children with the datasets that have been
analysed: most nationally representative household surveys in South Africa do not
contain detailed birth history information. The first part of this thesis analyses what data
are available to identify women with children and the quality of these data; it also
outlines four different methods to match women to their children using these data. The
second part of this thesis investigates the relationship between motherhood/childbearing
and women's labour force participation in South Africa.