The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act: Preliminary Evidence on Fertility and Employment

Background and purpose:

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) of 2022 requires U.S. employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers so they can continue working during pregnancy under safe conditions. Prior to the passage of the law, pregnant workers did not have a right to accommodations unless they resided in one of the 31 states that had passed its own state pregnancy accommodation law. Without accommodations, some pregnant workers were forced to choose between continuing to work under unsafe conditions—potentially threatening their health and that of their fetus—or leaving their job and losing the associated income and benefits. The aim of this paper is to examine the preliminary effects of the PWFA that was implemented in June of 2023 on fertility and employment among childbearing-age women.

Methods:

We use a difference-in-differences framework using representative samples of U.S. women from rapid release datasets: (1) the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) accessed via CDC Wonder and (2) the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). To estimate the effects on fertility, we examine the number of births per state and month (adjusted for mothers’ marital status and education) from July to December 2023 compared to births in prior years and comparing births exposed to accommodations under PWFA for more versus fewer months (e.g., 1-6 months). We stratify the sample by the effects of the Dobbs ruling on abortion access in the state. For employment outcomes, we use the CPS to identify two groups of women potentially-eligible for accommodations under PWFA: childbearing-age women ages 15 to 44 who are childless and those who have an infant under 12 months. We use a similar analytic approach to examine employment outcomes in July to December 2023 compared to birth in prior years and comparing each treatment group to an ineligible or less eligible group men and childless women, respectively. In addition to demographic controls, we include state and year fixed effects in all models, with cluster robust standard errors at the level of the state.

Results:

We find PWFA led to around 10% additional births in states with protected abortion access post-Dobbs. Effects appear to be driven by births to unmarried women and we fail to detect changes in infant health at birth. We find no effects of PWFA on labor force participation or being employed, but we find that mothers work around 1 hour/week less and are around 0.05 percentage points less likely to work full time compared to women without children.

Conclusions and implications:

Our findings provide novel evidence on the fertility and employment effects of the newly enacted PWFA. That we detect small increases in births suggests that safer work during pregnancy led to fewer miscarriages and more pregnancies ending in live births. We find no effects on employment among women of childbearing age potentially eligible for accommodations under PWFA, suggesting the effects on fertility might operate via pregnant women who would have worked regardless of accommodations. However, future research should examine the effects of PWFA on employment among pregnant women.