Why are fertility rates collapsing? Gender roles
A big part of female graduates’ decision to have children depends on how they expect their husbands to behave
Martin Wolf
© James FergusonThe decline in fertility has occurred in almost every country in the world.
Furthermore, notes the Nobel-laureate Claudia Goldin, in her 2023 paper “The Downside of Fertility”, every OECD member (bar Israel) has a total fertility rate (average number of children per woman in a lifetime) of less than 2.1 (the replacement rate).
Moreover, this is not at all new: “low levels of fertility have existed in many currently developed nations since the mid-1970s.”
This transformation in fertility is the opposite of what Thomas Malthus foretold in his Essay on the Principle of Population.
Humanity is unprecedentedly well off and yet has far fewer children relative to its numbers than before.
I considered the causes in May 2024, in “From the baby boom to the baby bust”.
One is that a far higher number of children survive into adulthood, reducing the need for multiple births.
Another is that we have managed to separate the joys of sex from the burdens of child-rearing.
Yet another is that people came to prefer a few “quality” children (in each of which they invest more) to a large quantity of them.
Yet these changes do not fully explain what is going on, not least the markedly lower fertility rates of graduate women and the extraordinarily swift collapses in fertility in fast-growing economies with traditional gender norms, notably that wives should look after the children.
In such countries, not only do the costs of bringing up children tend to be high, but they fall overwhelmingly on women.
On the whole, female graduates in the US (and elsewhere) are both far more likely to marry than non-graduates and have been more likely to have children in wedlock.
Thus, for college graduates, in particular, a big part of their decision to have children depends on how they expect their husbands to behave.
The simple (and obvious) point is that educated women who end up with the full responsibility for childcare for multiple children have relatively more to lose than their non-college-educated peers.
This is why they are more likely to insist on marriage.
It is also why they tend to have fewer children (though that is also because they start later).
Goldin argues that women who gain professional incomes are better off and have much more agency.
But if they are to do so, they need to postpone working in order to pursue their education, which increasingly they do.
Once they are educated and in the labour force, they need to choose whether and with whom to have children.
If they are to work successfully after having children, they will depend on the active help of their partners.
But they cannot be sure the latter are reliable.
Their partner might be a devoted helpmeet but he might leave her in the lurch.
If his support fails, women will find it hard to sustain their career.
So, graduate women hedge.
They not only insist on marriage, but have few children, often one or none.
Goldin uses this analysis to explain what has been happening in the US over the long term.
Thus, “the birth rate plummeted some time ago in the US . . .
Because women had more autonomy, they had more options, and because the relative earnings of college-educated workers greatly increased, their options became more valuable . . .
The opportunity cost of children to more educated women rose.
Women needed greater assurances that the care of their children would be shared with the father.”
Now consider the cases of countries that had huge economic growth from a low base, as in southern Europe and east Asia.
There, she argues, social mores are often stuck behind contemporary realities.
Men still hanker after the patriarchal norms of a traditional society.
Women enjoy the liberation of a modern economy.
Goldin notes that countries particularly affected by this expectations mismatch (such as Japan, South Korea and, I suspect, China) also have high rates of female childlessness.
Another relevant factor she alludes to is the “rat race”.
Quality children are expensive everywhere, but in some countries they are exorbitantly so.
In societies in which aspirations for children are universally high and shared, parents are competing with one another for a limited number of top slots for their children.
The result is intensive tutoring, which is an exquisite form of torture for both children and parents, and mostly the mothers.
This increases the direct and indirect costs to women of having children to an inordinate degree.
So, many do not do so.
Goldin’s main suggestion is that men need to shape up, though she recommends greater state support for parents, too.
But nothing seems likely to get the fertility rates of modern societies above replacement.
Where I do agree is that the reactionary right’s idea that the answer is to put women back into the kitchen and nursery is wicked and stupid.
Only the Taliban thinks it is clever to deprive women of education.
Moreover, if even the Chinese Communist Party cannot force women to have children they do not want, nobody can.
What is more, only an imbecile would suppose you would get more children by arguing that women treat their husbands as their masters, yet again.
We would get still fewer marriages and fewer children.
Gender norms will need to be even more equal and societal help with the costs of children even greater if there is to be much hope of raising fertility rates.
But a big rise seems unlikely.
A declining population looks inevitable in a huge number of rich countries, if mass immigration is ruled out.
Would that really be the disaster some fear?
No.
But that is a topic for another column.
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