Financial pressures are forcing increasing number of New Zealand mothers back to work, but the choice for many other women is simply not to become mothers at all, a new study has shown.

In the study of New Zealand working women's experiences, Waikato Demographer Janet Sceats reveals rising number of women are returning to work within six months of giving birth, largely because they cannot survive on one income, the South Island-based newspaper The Press reported on Monday.

But Janet Sceats also warns that urban professional women are choosing not to juggle children and work at all.

Fertility rates were falling, particularly in central Auckland, Wellington, and the North Shore, because more young women thought it was too hard to have children, Sceats said.

Fertility rates in central Auckland and the North Shore have slipped to 1.7 children per woman at child-bearing age when a figure of 2.1 nationally is needed to replace the population without immigration.

Sceats' study, commissioned by Tokyo's Institute of Population and Social Security, found 62 percent of women who were working full-time in professional or managerial jobs had no children. Those women were about five times more likely to have no children than their counterparts in other occupations, the study said.

"What we're seeing in this group of women is probably a conscious decision not to have children because of the difficulty of combining work and family," Sceats said, adding "That has profound implications for society."

The study also reveals that 22 percent of mothers born in the 1940s went back to work before their youngest child was two, but 64 percent of women born in the 1970s returned to work before their youngest child had reached the same age.

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