As many European countries have to cope with a shrinking and aging labor force, one important goal of redistributing work is to increase female labor force participation. In some countries, however, this increase could come at the cost of a reduced fertility rate as childcare facilities might be rare or institutional settings and social support are not sufficiently family friendly. In this paper we investigate how and especially at which ages female labor force participation could be increased in a country such as Austria, with an apparently strong negative correlation between childbearing and labor force participation, without reducing fertility even further. Our results indicate that an increase in female labor force participation is indeed possible if the participation rate remains low in the most fertile ages. It turns out, however, that the optimal labor force participation for females strongly depends on the initial fertility pattern of the female population.