Home-based work and childbearing.

We examine the timely yet greatly under-researched interplay between home-based work (HBW) and women's birth transitions. Past research has shown that HBW may facilitate and/or jeopardize work-family balance, depending on the worker's family and work circumstances. Following that research, we develop here a theoretical framework on how HBW can facilitate or hinder fertility. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study 2009-19 and random-effects cloglog regression, we study the link between HBW and first- and second-birth risks. We find that HBW is negatively associated with the transition to motherhood and unrelated to the progression to a second child. We also show that HBW helps to enable women to have children if they would otherwise face a long commute. All in all, our findings do not support the idea that the spread of HBW will lead to an immediate increase in fertility.

His unemployment, her response, and the moderating role of welfare policies in European countries.

Recent changes in labour markets have increased employment instability. Under these conditions, in male breadwinner families women might increase their labour supply when their male partners become unemployed. Previous studies have extensively investigated the role played by household and individual characteristics in explaining such increases in the labour supply of women. However, studies which examine the moderating role of specific welfare policies are missing. Our study contributes to the literature by investigating the moderating effect of childcare and tax-benefit policies for the labour supply response of women following the unemployment of their partner. We focus on a sample of 24 EU member states and the UK, during the period 2009-2019, combining longitudinal microdata from EU-SILC with country-period specific policy indicators generated with the use of the tax-benefit simulation model EUROMOD, UKMOD and country-period specific indicators of childcare use.

Working from Home During Covid-19 Pandemic and Changes to Fertility Intentions Among Parents.

The Covid-19 pandemic and related massive spread of home based work led to substantial changes in the conditions for combining work and childbearing. On the one hand, working from home helped parents to accommodate increased childcare needs during the pandemic. On the other hand, it led to acute experiences of blurred boundaries between work and family life during childcare and school closures. Therefore, the direction of the impact of working from home on fertility intentions during the pandemic is not unequivocal. In this paper, we investigate how working from home was related to change in fertility intentions of mothers and fathers during the pandemic and discuss the complex mechanisms behind these relationships. With the use of unique Familydemic Survey data from a representative sample of parents in Poland, we estimate multinomial logit regressions by gender and consider a set of potential moderators, including financial well-being, gender relations, and occupational characteristics. We find evidence for an overall negative relationship between home based work and fertility intentions for mothers, but we also uncover some positive moderating effects. In particular, we shed light on the unobvious moderating role of gendered division of unpaid labor from before the pandemic.

Selection of cross-reactive T cells by commensal and food-derived yeasts drives cytotoxic TH1 cell responses in Crohn's disease.

Aberrant CD4+ T cell reactivity against intestinal microorganisms is considered to drive mucosal inflammation in inflammatory bowel diseases. The disease-relevant microbial species and the corresponding microorganism-specific, pathogenic T cell phenotypes remain largely unknown. In the present study, we identified common gut commensal and food-derived yeasts, as direct activators of altered CD4+ T cell reactions in patients with Crohn's disease (CD). Yeast-responsive CD4+ T cells in CD display a cytotoxic T helper cell (TH1 cell) phenotype and show selective expansion of T cell clones that are highly cross-reactive to several commensal, as well as food-derived, fungal species. This indicates cross-reactive T cell selection by repeated encounter with conserved fungal antigens in the context of chronic intestinal disease. Our results highlighted a role of yeasts as drivers of aberrant CD4+ T cell reactivity in patients with CD and suggest that both gut-resident fungal commensals and daily dietary intake of yeasts might contribute to chronic activation of inflammatory CD4+ T cell responses in patients with CD.

Industrial Robots and Regional Fertility in European Countries.

In this study, we examine whether the long-term structural changes in the labour market, driven by automation, affect fertility. The adoption of industrial robots is used as a proxy for these changes. It has tripled since the mid-1990s in the EU, tremendously changing the conditions of participating in the labour market. On the one hand, new jobs are created, benefitting largely the highly skilled workers. On the other hand, the growing turnover in the labour market and changing content of jobs induce fears of job displacement and make workers continuously adjust to new requirements (reskill, upskill, increase work efforts). The consequences of these changes are particularly strong for the employment and earning prospects of low and middle-educated workers. Our focus is on six European countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. We link regional data on fertility and employment structures by industry from Eurostat (NUTS-2) with data on robot adoption from the International Federation of Robotics. We estimate fixed effects linear models with instrumental variables in order to account for the external shocks which may affect fertility and robot adoption in parallel. Our findings suggest robots tend to exert a negative impact on fertility in highly industrialised regions, regions with relatively low educated populations and those which are technologically less advanced. At the same time, better educated and prospering regions may even experience fertility improvements as a result of technological change. The family and labour market institutions of the country may further moderate these effects.

Familydemic Cross Country and Gender Dataset on work and family outcomes during COVID-19 pandemic.

Here we present the Familydemic Cross Country and Gender Dataset (FCCGD), which offers cross country and gender comparative data on work and family outcomes among parents of dependent children, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers six countries from two continents representing diverse welfare regimes as well as distinct policy reactions to the pandemic outbreak. The FCCGD was created using the first wave of a web-based international survey (Familydemic) carried out between June and September 2021, on large samples of parents (aged 20-59) living with at least one child under 12 in Canada, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the US. While individual datasets are not available due to country-level restriction policies, the presented database allows for cross-country comparison of a wide range of employment outcomes and work arrangements, the division of diverse tasks of unpaid labour (housework and childcare) in couples, experiences with childcare and school closures due to the pandemic and subjective assessments of changes to work-life balance, career prospects and the financial situation of families (234 variables).

Life-Course Trajectories of Childless Women: Country-Specific or Universal?

While existing research has documented complexities in biographies of childless women, few studies to date have systematically examined the life-course pathways of the childless from a comparative, cross-country perspective. In this paper, we analyse biographies of childless women in four countries-Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States-in order to investigate whether pathways into childlessness are country-specific or commonly shared across institutional, cultural, and geographical settings. Partnership, education, and employment histories are examined using sequence analysis with dynamic Hamming distance and cluster analysis. Discrepancy analysis indicates a country-effect in women's biographies although life-course patterns identified in each country share similarities. Overall, seven life-course trajectories have been identified, with the most numerous cluster comprising single, working women who completed their education at a relatively young age. The results highlight a marked variation in the life-courses of childless women. Put together, these findings provide descriptive evidence for both country-specificity and cross-country similarity in the pathways to childlessness. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09624-5.

The Bone Microarchitecture Deficit in Patients with Hemophilia Is Influenced by Arthropathy, Hepatitis C Infection, and Physical Activity.

Low bone mineral density (BMD) is common in patients with hemophilia (PWHs). The aim of the present study was to describe BMD and microarchitecture in PWHs in Northern Germany and to determine factors contributing to possible skeletal alterations. Demographic characteristics, BMD and microarchitecture, bone metabolism markers, and orthopaedic joint score (OJS) were assessed during routine check-ups. Areal BMD was assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) at the hip and lumbar spine. Volumetric BMD and microarchitecture were quantified by high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography at the distal radius and tibia. Eighty male PWHs (median age, 33 years; range, 18-77) were retrospectively analyzed, of whom 67 (84.0%) and 13 (16.0%) had hemophilia A and B, respectively. Fifty-four (68.0%), six (7.0%), and 20 (25.0%) patients had severe, moderate, or mild hemophilia, and 35 (44.0%) were hepatitis C virus (HCV) positive. DXA analysis revealed low BMD (Z-score ≤ - 2.0) in 27.5% of PWHs, and higher bone turnover values were associated with lower BMD. Bone microarchitecture was dominated by cortical deficits at the radius and trabecular deficits at the tibia. Cortical deficits at the radius were influenced by lower body mass index, low-grade inflammation, and treatment regimen (higher cortical thickness on primary prophylaxis). Trabecular alterations at the tibia were mainly associated with OJS and HCV status. A positive effect of self-reported sportive activity on BMD could be shown. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that the site-specific microarchitectural deficit observed in PWHs is primarily negatively influenced by poor joint status, inflammation, HCV infection, and high bone turnover.

Employment Instability and Fertility in Europe: A Meta-Analysis.

The relationship between employment instability and fertility is a major topic in demographic research, with a proliferation of published papers on this matter, especially since the Great Recession. Employment instability, which most often manifests in unemployment or time-limited employment, is usually deemed to have a negative effect on fertility, although different fertility reactions are hypothesized by sociological theories, and micro-level evidence is fragmented and contradictory. We used meta-analytic techniques to synthesize European research findings, offer general conclusions about the effects of employment instability on fertility (in terms of direction and size), and rank different sources of employment instability. Our results suggest that employment instability has a nonnegligible negative effect on fertility. Men's unemployment is more detrimental for fertility than men's time-limited employment; conversely, a woman having a fixed-term contract is least likely to have a child. Next, the negative effect of employment instability on fertility has become stronger over time, and is more severe in Southern European countries, where social protection for families and the unemployed is least generous. Finally, meta-regression estimates demonstrate that failing to account for income and partner characteristics leads to an overestimation of the negative effect of employment instability on fertility. We advance the role of these two factors as potential mechanisms by which employment instability affects fertility. Overall, this meta-analysis provides the empirical foundation for new studies on the topic.

Characterization of Ocular Surface Microbial Profiles Revealed Discrepancies between Conjunctival and Corneal Microbiota.

The ocular microbiome composition has only been partially characterized. Here, we used RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) data to assess microbial diversity in human corneal tissue. Additionally, conjunctival swab samples were examined to characterize ocular surface microbiota. Short RNA-Seq reads, obtained from a previous transcriptome study of 50 corneal tissues, were mapped to the human reference genome GRCh38 to remove sequences of human origin. The unmapped reads were then used for taxonomic classification by comparing them with known bacterial, archaeal, and viral sequences from public databases. The components of microbial communities were identified and characterized using both conventional microbiology and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques in 36 conjunctival swabs. The majority of ocular samples examined by conventional and molecular techniques showed very similar microbial taxonomic profiles, with most of the microorganisms being classified into Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria phyla. Only 50% of conjunctival samples exhibited bacterial growth. The PCR detection provided a broader overview of positive results for conjunctival materials. The RNA-Seq assessment revealed significant variability of the corneal microbial communities, including fastidious bacteria and viruses. The use of the combined techniques allowed for a comprehensive characterization of the eye microbiome's elements, especially in aspects of microbiota diversity.

The Great Recession and Fertility in Europe: A Sub-national Analysis.

This study investigates how the changes in labour market conditions and economic growth were associated with fertility before and during the Great Recession in Europe in 2002-2014. In contrast to previous studies, which largely concentrated at the country level, we use data for 251 European regions in 28 European Union (EU) member states prior to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom in January 2020. We apply three-level growth-curve model which allows for a great deal of flexibility in modelling temporal change while controlling for variation in economic conditions across regions and countries. Our findings show that fertility decline was strongly related to unemployment increase; this relationship was significant at different reproductive ages. Deteriorating economic conditions were associated with a stronger decline in fertility during the economic recession as compared with the pre-recession period. This evidence suggests the salience of factors such as broader perception of uncertainty that we could not capture in our models and which rose to prominence during the Great Recession. Furthermore, strongest fertility declines were observed in Southern Europe, Ireland and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. countries and regions where labour market conditions deteriorated most during the recession period. In Western Europe, and especially in the Nordic countries, fertility rates were not closely associated with the recession indicators.

LPS-induced expression and release of monocyte tissue factor in patients with haemophilia.

In haemophilia, thrombin generation and fibrin deposition upon vascular injury critically depend on the tissue factor (TF)-driven coagulation pathway. TF expression by monocytes/macrophages and circulating microvesicles contributes to haemostasis, thrombosis and inflammation. Inflammation is a hallmark of blood-induced joint disease. The aim of this study is to correlate TF production by whole-blood monocytes with inflammatory markers and clinical parameters in patients with moderate-to-severe haemophilia A or B (n = 43) in comparison to healthy males (n = 23). Monocyte TF antigen and microvesicle-associated TF procoagulant activity (MV TF PCA) were measured immediately after blood draw (baseline) and following incubation of whole blood with buffer or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) using two-colour flow cytometry and chromogenic FXa generation assay, respectively. Patients with HIV or uncontrolled HBV/HCV infections were excluded. TF was hardly detectable and not different in baseline and buffer-treaded samples from both groups. Stimulation with LPS, however, induced monocyte TF production, with increased TF-specific mean fluorescence intensity (P = 0.08) and MV TF PCA (P < 0.05) in patients compared to controls. Patients also had elevated hs-CRP and IL-6 serum levels (P < 0.001), which correlated with LPS-induced TF parameters. Further exploratory analyses revealed that the presence of systemic (low-grade) inflammation and boosted LPS-induced monocyte TF production were mainly restricted to patients with clinically controlled HBV and/or HCV infection (n = 16), who were older and also had a significantly worse orthopaedic joint score than patients with no history of viral hepatitis (P < 0.01). Our study delineates a previously unrecognised link between systemic inflammation and inducible monocyte TF production in patients with haemophilia A or B.

The motherhood wage penalty: A meta-analysis.

Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This 'motherhood wage gap' has been reported in numerous studies. We summarize the existing empirical evidence on this topic using meta-analysis and test for several mechanisms which can be responsible for the persistence of the wage gap. Based on 208 wage effects of having exactly one child and 245 wage effects of the total number of children, we find an average motherhood wage gap of around 3.6-3.8%. While the gaps associated with the total number of children are mostly explained by the loss of mothers' human capital during child-related career breaks, the gaps associated with one child are predominantly driven by mothers' choice of jobs and occupations that pay less. The residual gap is smallest in Nordic countries, where public policies actively support gender equality and reconciliation of work and family, as well as Belgium and France, and largest in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries.

Self-employment as a work-and-family reconciliation strategy? Evidence from Poland.

As self-employment offers greater flexibility compared to wage and salary contracts, women might choose it to achieve a better work-family balance. Past empirical research on this topic yielded equivocal results, however. We add to this discussion and provide evidence for Poland. Public support for working parents in Poland is relatively poor and women need to develop strategies in order to combine work and care. Running one's own business might be such a strategy. We adopt a life-course perspective and investigate whether self-employment encourages childbearing and whether women who have already given birth are more likely to opt for self-employment. We estimate multi-process hazard models, using the Generations and Gender Survey. We find that self-employment neither affects women's fertility decisions nor does it attract mothers on wage and salary contracts. Nevertheless, it is chosen by non-employed mothers as it may be the only opportunity for them to enter the labour market.

Partners' Educational Pairings and Fertility Across Europe.

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples' educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners' education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the "new home economics" approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners' education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.

Country-Specific Conditions for Work and Family Reconciliation: An Attempt at Quantification.

The country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation (family policies, labour market structures and gender norms) are believed to influence tensions between paid employment and childbearing. So far there have been very few attempts to quantify these conditions into a single measure which would allow for comparisons across countries of the magnitude of the barriers that working parents encounter. Such a quantitative index could also facilitate a quantitative investigation of the association between the macro-level conditions for work and family reconciliation and fertility at the individual level. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by proposing a quantitative index of country-specific conditions for work and family reconciliation, which may be used, for example, in a two-level regression framework. The index takes into account all three components of the conditions for work and family reconciliation. We also perform a series of uncertainty and sensitivity analyses which verify the robustness of our assumptions and which illustrate the range of the index volatility.

Work-Family Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Childbearing and Subjective Well-Being.

Many empirical studies find that parents are not as happy as non-parents or that parenthood exerts a negative effect on subjective well-being (SWB). We add to these findings by arguing that there is a key moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, i.e. the level of work-family conflict. We hypothesize that the birth of a child means an increase in the level of work-family tension, which may be substantial for some parents and relatively weak for others. To outline such an approach, we estimate fixed-effects models using panel data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. We find that childbearing negatively affects SWB only when parents, mothers in particular, face a substantial work-family conflict, providing thus support for our hypothesis.

The educational gradient in marital disruption: a meta-analysis of European research findings.

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the effects of women's education on union dissolution in Europe, but results have varied substantially. This paper seeks to assess the relationship between educational attainment and the incidence of marital disruption by systematizing the existing empirical evidence. A quantitative literature review (a meta-analysis) was conducted to investigate the temporal change in the relationship, net of inter-study differences. The results point to a weakening of the positive educational gradient in marital disruption over time and even to a reversal in the direction of this gradient in some countries. The findings also show that the change in the educational gradient can be linked to an increase in access to divorce. Finally, the results suggest that women's empowerment has played an important role in changing the educational gradient, while the liberalization of divorce laws has not.

Diverse Effects of Women's Employment on Fertility: Insights From Italy and Poland: Diverses conséquences de l'emploi des femmes sur la fécondité: quelques informations à partir des cas de l'Italie et de la Pologne.

In this paper, we look into how country-specific factors shape the interrelationship between childbearing and women's labor supply. To this end, we compare Italy and Poland, two low-fertility countries where the country-specific obstacles to work and family reconciliation are similarly strong but which differ in the history of women's labor supply and the extent to which couples' material aspirations are satisfied by men's earnings. Our findings show that women's employment clearly conflicts with childbearing in Italy, while in Poland women tend to combine the two activities, despite the similar difficulties they face. These results challenged the standard microeconomic explanations and point to the importance of other country-specific factors, apart from conditions for work and family reconciliation, in shaping women's employment and fertility decisions, such as economic incentives or culturally rooted behavioral patterns. Overall, our study provides thus foundations for explaining the variation in the relationship between women's employment and fertility in an enlarged Europe.

Cet article étudie comment des contextes nationaux spécifiques façonnent les relations entre la procréation et l'offre de main d'œuvre féminine. Dans ce but, nous comparons l'Italie et la Pologne, deux pays ayant des faibles niveaux de fécondité, avec pour chacun d'eux d'importants obstacles liés au contexte national allant à l'encontre de la conciliation famille- travail, mais qui diffèrent quant à l'histoire de l'offre de main d'œuvre féminine et sur la façon dont les aspirations matérielles du couple sont couvertes par le salaire de l'homme. Les résultats montrent qu'en Italie l'emploi des femmes entre clairement en conflit avec la procréation, alors qu'en Pologne les femmes essayent de combiner ces deux « activités ¼ bien qu'elles aient à faire face à des difficultés semblables. Ces résultats remettent en question les explications micro-économiques classiques et montrent que, outre les conditions de conciliation famille­travail, des facteurs propres à chaque pays, tels que des incitants économiques ou des schémas de comportements culturellement enracinés, vont jouer un rôle important dans les décisions de fécondité et de participation des femmes au marché du travail. Notre étude fournit ainsi quelques bases pour expliquer les variations de la relation entre emploi des femmes et fécondité dans l'Europe élargie.

Concentration of fungal biomass and trichothecenes in different parts of einkorn.

Analyses of ergosterol (ERG), adenosine-5'-triphosphate (ATP) and groups A and B trichothecenes were performed in three Triticum monococcum cultivars registered in Germany (Albini, Terzino and Tifi), grown in the organic system. The experiment was carried out on two dates: the first - in the final phase of flowering (BBCH 69) and the second -- in the phase of full ripeness (BBCH 89). The analyses were performed on shanks, glumes, grain and awns. Concentrations of analyzed metabolites in different parts of T. monococcum plants varied significantly. Mean ERG concentration in the first term was more than 30 times higher than immediately before harvest, whereas for group B trichothecenes it was 4 times higher. Contents of ATP and concentrations of group A trichothecenes were similar at both times. When analyzing parts of the spike, the highest amount of metabolites was recorded in shanks (ERG - 114 mg/kg, ATP 900,000 RLU, group A and B trichothecenes - 0.07 and 0.20 mg/kg, respectively), while the lowest in grain (ERG - 5 mg/kg, ATP 55,000 RLU, group A and B trichothecenes - 0.03 and 0.08 mg/kg, respectively). A higher ERG concentration was found in awns (65 mg/kg) than in glumes (41 mg/kg), whereas for ATP and group A and B trichothecenes by contrast higher concentrations were recorded in glumes (160,000 RLU, 0.06 and 0.029 mg/kg, respectively) than in awns (77,000 RLU, 0.05 and 0.014 mg/kg, respectively). Recorded results indicate a potential occurrence of trichothecenes in shanks, awns and glumes already during flowering, when grain has not yet developed. In these parts of plants, after harvest, the highest amounts of microorganisms and Fusarium toxins were found, which pose a threat for farmers and workers employed in the cereal industry.