Educated women having kids in their 30s, 40s: StatsCan
By 24 Hours/The Canadian Press
September 17, 2009

The number of older mothers in Canada with a pre-school child or children has more than doubled in the last 20 years, according to a new report from Statistics Canada.

The 2006 census found of the 1.3 million women aged 40 to 44, 8.9% were mothers of at least one child aged four and under.

And the report suggests that highly educated women — especially those with university degrees — are much more likely to have children when they’re in their 30s and 40s.

The study found that 13.8% of women aged 40 to 44 who had a bachelor’s degree were mothers to a young child, compared with 6.4% of women with a high school diploma or less. The proportion was 19.8% for women who had a doctorate.

“We know that there’s a strong link between level and education of women and the likelihood that they become a mother later in life,” said Statistics Canada researcher Martin Turcotte, who co-authored the report. “We can see a pattern and we can expect given that the share of women with university degrees is still growing that this trend in later motherhood will continue in the next years.”

The report also finds that occupations with the highest proportion of older moms with young kids were those that required a high level of skill and education, including dentists, judges and lawyers.

Female health professionals aged 40 to 44 were particularly likely to have young kids. When examining women specialist physicians alone, one in four of these doctors with a medical specialty was an older mother to a pre-school child — the highest proportion reported of any individual occupation in Canada….