The Youngest Moms

I am not sure if this is cause for celebration or national introspection, but Estonian first-time mothers are the youngest in the EU.

This is info contained in a MaltaMedia article about some gender stats provided by Eurostat. Read on.

The average age of women at the birth of their first child was higher in 2004 than in 1994 in all Member States. It increased by about 1 year and 5 months at the EU25 level. The youngest first-time mothers were found in Estonia (24.6 years), Latvia (24.7) and Lithuania (24.8), and the oldest in the United Kingdom (29.7) and Spain (29.2), compared to a EU25 average of 28.2.

I do remember there were people as young as I was in Tallinn Keskhaigla that stormy night in December of '03. I have to say there's something endearing about young parents, even though we may lack in the finanical.life experience department. Although, as a wiseman once told me, "People living in caves raised children too. It can't be so hard." But there's an interesting factoid for this statistic. For every woman who haves her baby in her late 30s, that means there's another woman giving birth in her mid-teens to bring that average down.

Anyway, more good/bad/interesting news. Estonia is an egalitarian state where both men and women are equally unemployed.

Women were more likely to be unemployed than men in the EU25, with an unemployment rate of 9.6% for women compared to 7.6% for men in January 2006. The female unemployment rate ranged from 3.8% in Ireland to 19.1% in Poland. Only in Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Sweden and the United Kingdom were the same or a lower proportion of women unemployed than men. In Malta, the unemployment rate for January 2006 was 98% for women and 6.9% for men.