A solution to declining birth rates? More supportive men, economist finds

Zoom in: Men willing to play a bigger role in parenting and house-work, lift birthrates, finds Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, who won a Nobel in 2023 for her work on women in the labor market.

• She presented her paper "The Downside of Fertility" at the Jackson Hole Economics Conference on Friday morning.
• "Fertility is higher when men and women share more in household- and child-care, and is lower when men do little in the home," she said.

The big picture: The birth rate in the U.S. first started to fall decades ago as the economy expanded. The decline was aided by the advent of the pill. Women suddenly had a greater ability to postpone childbearing — they could marry later, get more education and gain more agency in the workforce.

• To feel comfortable starting a family, Goldin writes, women needed assurances that caring for their children would be a shared responsibility.
• "Why have a child if it means giving up one's future income and security and the child's security," Goldin told the conference Friday. "Assuming, if you will, that men can either be dads who will put in the time with their children, or they can be duds," she said, to audience laughter.
• "Not funny," she added.

How it works: Goldin examined how this dynamic plays out across two groups of countries. The first includes the U.S., France and Germany, and has moderately low fertility rates that first started declining a half-century ago.

• The second group, including Italy, Japan and South Korea, has the lowest fertility rates in the world and started falling more recently and more sharply.

The difference? In the first group of countries, economic modernization has been underway for almost a century. Society has had time to adjust its traditions.

• In the second, economic modernization happened more quickly and more recently. There's a greater mismatch between what women want (more agency) and what men want (keep the traditional status quo).
• "Men gain more from partly remaining in the past, women gain more from taking fuller advantage of the present," Goldin said.

For example: There's been a good deal of reporting from Japan and South Korea, in particular, tracking that difference.

• Here's how one South Korean woman explained her decision not to marry or have children to the BBC: "It's hard to find a dateable man in Korea - one who will share the chores and the child care equally. And women who have babies alone are not judged kindly."

By the numbers: The mismatch shows up in the gap in hours men and women spend doing household and care work.

• In the lowest fertility countries, women do much more work at home. In Japan and Italy, women do three hours more housework than men.
• In Sweden, with a moderately higher fertility rate, the difference is 0.8 hours.

The big picture: Governments around the world are concerned with declining birth rates.

• As the population ages and potentially even declines in some places, there's concern that there won't be enough young people to drive economic growth, fill jobs or care for older people.
• In the U.S., as anti-immigration sentiment builds there's an increasing pro-natalist movement urging native-born Americans to have more children.

Between the lines: Among some pro-natalists there is a push for women to embrace being "tradwives," taking a more traditional stay-at-home approach to work and family.

• Goldin's paper demonstrates that pushing for more traditionalism could have the opposite effect.

The bottom line: Looked at through this new paper, the onus isn't on women to become more "trad," but for men to become more dad.

--Neil Irwin contributed reporting