Women with different gender attitudes might respond to fertility differently. Childcare responsibility would skew more toward women in the presence of less gender-egalitarian norms. At the same time, the expectation that women would follow a more traditional role in society would limit their labor market participation and more so after having children. Therefore, women's "gender norms" type would affect how responsive their employment is to fertility changes.

In this paper, I ask to what extent the effect of fertility on female labor supply depends on gender norms. I estimate the effects of fertility on women's employment using an instrument variable (IV) approach, using variation in the sex composition of the first two children to instrument for the probability of having more than two children. To separate the role of gender norms from institutional features, I use the American Community Survey (ACS) and compare the labor supply response to children among women living in the United States but born in different countries. Hence, I compare women born in the United States (US) (natives) to those born outside the US (immigrants). For immigrants, I compare those born in less and more gender-egalitarian countries. To do so, I match immigrants' country of origin with their gender gap measured by the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index (GGI). Thus, the GGI measures immigrants' country of origin gender norms. Using the sample GGI's mean, I group immigrant women between low GGI and high GGI. Consequently, the groups represent different levels of gender attitudes.

The findings show that women from all countries reduce employment due to having more than two children. Yet, this effect is substantially larger for women born in less gender-egalitarian countries. In particular, women from countries with the least egalitarian gender norms have an employment response three times larger than the employment response of natives. Thus, the negative effect of fertility on the labor supply decreases with gender egalitarianism. These results show that to recognize the relevance and reach of family policies that aim to improve gender equality, we need to understand the gender attitudes’ composition of the policies’ target population.