Women in Canada’s highest-income families were 2.5 times more likely to have a first child in 2023 than women in the lowest-income families, a gap that widened from 2.1 times in 2017, Statistics Canada said Wednesday.
The finding comes from a study released in The Daily on Sept. 9, titled “Income and employment characteristics associated with women’s first birth, 2017 to 2023,” which linked census, tax and vital statistics records to track childless women aged 22 to 39 who were employed and living with a married or common-law partner.
In 2023, women in the top fifth of family income had a 14.1 per cent likelihood of having a first child, more than double the 5.6 per cent recorded among women in the bottom fifth, the agency said.
The likelihood of a first birth fell across every income group between 2017 and 2023, according to the study, but the decline was steepest among the lowest-income women. That uneven drop, rather than any gain at the top, is what pushed the two groups further apart.
A second finding cuts against a common assumption about dual-earner households. Women’s individual earnings were also associated with a higher likelihood of a first birth, Statistics Canada said, but the differences tied to family income were larger and grew faster. How much of the household’s total income a woman herself contributed was not strongly or consistently related to whether she became a parent.
Access to sufficient and stable economic resources “may play a larger role in whether coupled and employed women have a first child than the division of those earnings within the couple,” the agency wrote.
Industry of employment mattered nearly as much as income. Women working in public administration, education or health were consistently more likely to have a first child than women in other industries, regardless of income level, and that gap also widened. In 2017, public sector workers were 16.3 per cent more likely to have a first child than women in administrative, support or service industries. By 2023, the difference had grown to 34.3 per cent. Statistics Canada attributed the widening to larger proportional declines among the second group rather than to any increase among public sector workers.
Women in unionized jobs were also more likely to have a first birth, though by a smaller margin, ranging from 4.6 per cent higher in 2017 and 2023 to 8.4 per cent higher in 2018, the agency said. Self-employment showed no stable relationship either way.
The study also revisits Canada’s brief pandemic-era fertility bump. In 2021, when the country recorded its first year-over-year increase in the total fertility rate since 2008, the rise in first births was concentrated among women in higher-income families, while the likelihood slipped slightly for the lowest-income group. Statistics Canada said similar patterns have been observed in other high-income countries, suggesting economic advantage may be playing an increasing role in who becomes a parent.
The research lands against a backdrop of record-low national fertility. Canada’s total fertility rate was 1.25 children per woman in 2024, a record low and within the range demographers call ultra-low fertility, Statistics Canada reported last September. The average age of mothers at the birth of their child reached a record high of 31.8 years that year, up from 26.7 years in 1976.
The agency cautioned that its own findings may understate the role of income. The study excludes recent immigrants and non-tax-filers, and census undercoverage is higher among young adults, which Statistics Canada said likely biases the sample toward more economically advantaged groups. The study also did not measure fertility intentions, relationship quality, health status including infertility, or preferences about work and family balance, any of which the agency said could help explain the patterns it observed.
