Who delays childbearing? The relationship between fertility, education and personality traits

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this paper assesses the role of personality traits on timing of motherhood and investigates whether, and in what way, personality traits can explain the differences in maternity timing between more and less educated women. We estimate a log-logistic model of the time to first child birth and show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the Big Five personality traits and timing to motherhood. The results also show that education differences in fertility timing seem to be mainly driven by high educated women who are particularly “open-minded”.