Visualizing birth-mom data

Who’s birthing the kids?

The Census Bureau is out with its latest fertility report with data from 2010. In a blog brief on the data, they focus on the pattern of delaying births among women who have more education.

Here are two ways of visualizing the breakdowns from 2010, dividing up the mothers who had a birth in the previous year three ways: by age, education, and marital/partner status. First, age and education. This shows, for example, that college graduates had 28% of the births in the year before June 2010, with 19% of those 28% being age 30 or older.

Unlike the college graduates, women with less education contribute more of the total births when they are under age 30. Census also provided the breakdown by marital/partner status, helpfully including cohabitation as a category. This graph shows the share of new birth mothers in each age-by-education group that is single, cohabiting, or married.

This shows that more than 90% of the 30+ college graduates who had a birth were married, compared with less than 30% of the under-30s who haven’t finished high school (some of them are still in high school). It also shows that among those who haven’t been to college, almost 20% are cohabiting. For the college graduates under 30, more than half of the unmarried women were cohabiting.

Just FYI.