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Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
I find this point interesting, because I distinctly remember a zeitgeist a few decades back in which "gender equality" was being pushed specifically because it would reduce birth rates to ward off Malthusian catastrophe. This was specifically in the lens of low Western birthrates being preferable to higher ones in largely Third-World nations. Admittedly, "the zeitgeist" is hard to cite, so perhaps I didn't really understand the full situation at the time.
I'm not particularly convinced that either direction is unilaterally correct: it's quite possible that the results are contextual based on a number of other variables, but it does provide an example of how "more feminism and gender equality" seems to be pushed (primarily by the Left) as a cure for all societal ills. That last part I think is a drastic oversimplification, but probably also a bit of a weakman of the actual arguments.
Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"
Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"
Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"
The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.
A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.
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