Fertility and Gender Equity in Europe

New York Magazine has an interesting article about fertility in Europe. Most European countries have a huge fertility problem. Since they have gone through the demographic transition, their populations are actually declining. Many do not have the relatively liberal immigration policies of the US -- which would help because immigrants have more children. (I didn't think that I would ever call the US policies liberal.) They are getting in a financial crunch because many have relatively generous social service programs, and you have a dwindling number of workers paying for an increasing number of recipients.

So European countries would be really interested in knowing how you could boost fertility. A study in Italy highlighted one factor: culture and how much housework women were expected to do.

The accepted demographic wisdom had been that as women enter the job market, a society's fertility rate drops. That has been broadly true in the developed world, but more recently, and especially in Europe, the numbers don't bear it out. In fact, something like the opposite has been the case. According to Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, analysis of recent studies showed that "high fertility was associated with high female labor-force participation . . . and the lowest fertility levels in Europe since the mid-1990s are often found in countries with the lowest female labor-force participation." In other words, working mothers are having more babies than stay-at-home moms.

How can this be? A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University of Turin, and three of her colleagues compared the situation of women in Italy and the Netherlands. They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, "It's about how much the man participates in child care."

The broad answer to the "Where are all the European babies?" question thus begins to suggest itself. Accompanying the spectacular transformation of modern society since the 1960s -- notably the changing role of women, with greater opportunities for education and employment, the advent of modern birth control and a new ability to tailor a lifestyle -- has been a tension between forces that, in many places, have not been reconciled. That tension is perfectly apparent, of course. Ask any working mother. But some societies have done a better job than others of reconciling the conflicting forces. In Europe, many countries with greater gender equality have a greater social commitment to day care and other institutional support for working women, which gives those women the possibility of having second or third children.

This is a crucial difference between the north -- including France and the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries -- and the south. The Scandinavian countries have both the most vigorous social-welfare systems in Europe and -- at 1.8 -- among the highest fertility rates.

I take two things for this study.

First, I think it is confounding at least partially the issues of cultural gender equity and social support. Yes, Scandanavian countries may have greater social support, but they also have stronger perceptions of cultural equity between the sexes. It does not necessarily follow that elaborate systems of social support are required for high fertility. The US has relatively high fertility, but relatively low social support.

Second, it highlights an issue we were talking about before with respect to women in science. The macro-phenomenon of a gender disparity in science is the consequence of many micro-phenomenon of individual decisions. Remedying the macro requires changes the incentives on the micro level. For women in science, this could be by providing more child care. (On that ground -- as opposed to fertility choices -- social support may very well be sine qua non.) For increasing fertility, it could be by encouraging a cultural shift towards equal participation in child-rearing. (Whether or not that is possible is another matter, but at least you know what you need to do. The NYTimes Magazine also had an interesting article on parents trying to do this.)

Basically, my point is that you have to focus on the incentives that drive individual reproductive and career decisions. The solutions are bottom-up rather than top-down.

Hat-tip: Free Exchange