The Impact Of Family-friendly Policy On The Fertility Intention Of Professional Women And The Pathway Analysis Of Fertility Encouragement Policies

The Communist Party of China(CPC)stated in its 20 th national congress that “We will construct China into a healthier country by prioritizing clinical protection of the people’s health,establishing a policy ecosystem of boosting birth rates,and proactively pursuing a national strategy against population aging issues”.To date,the population aging is a serious problem for our country.Any unwise or unnecessary national decision would cost us billions of fortunes in the next decades.Thus,it is critical to study how to evoke child-bearing intention of our females,with a specific concern of the three-child policy.By combing domestic and foreign literature on family-friendly policies,this paper divides family-friendly policies into three categories: state-supported,enterprise-supported,and family-supported.To measure the impact of these three types of policies,we design a questionnaire for professional women’s fertility intention and interview its stakeholders to transform the impact of policies into questions to conduct a quantitative analysis of the influence.Based on the data obtained from the questionnaire,we use baseline regression and the mediation effect model to explore the impact of three kinds of family-friendly policies on the fertility intention of professional women.The results show that: First,the national,enterprise,and family support policies all have a significant impact on the reproductive intention of professional women,among which the national support policies have the greatest impact.Secondly,according to the mediation effect model,all three kinds of family-friendly policies can positively affect the fertility intention of professional women by reducing work-family conflict.Third,through constructing three types of support policies and the nature of the unit,the interaction term regression analysis further proved that the three types of policies can improve the fertility intention of professional women.After controlling other variables,the three types of support policies can significantly improve the fertility intention of professional women at optimal childbearing age for different types of work units.Among them,the positive impact of enterprise support policies on enterprise unit types(state-owned enterprises,private enterprises,joint ventures,or foreign-funded enterprises)is significantly higher than that of the other three sectors.Government departments and public institutions are more sensitive to the national fertility support policy.Furthermore,we proposed several approaches based our analysis mentioned above to improve birth rates.Firstly,it was suggested that the government should increase the related support to the enterprise,expand efforts to optimize maternity insurance policy as well as individual income tax policy,increase inclusive childcare to establish a diversified childcare system to benefit legal mothers or mother-to-be more and optimize retirement policies.Secondly,the enterprise level policy should prefer“people-oriented” enterprise culture to secure the warranty of employee birth-giving benefits such as salary continuity,maternity insurance coverage and career planning.Thirdly,the family members should be more supportive to the needs of professional females at both physical and emotional levels.