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Notes -
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)
(cont, part 2)
The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.
Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":
And:
But is this the true story of South Korea?
I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:
Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.
Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):
Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.
As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:
In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.
...on to part 3...
(cont, part 3)
The elephant in the room
Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.
When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.
Fertility Rate
Gross college enrollment rate for women
% national legistlators women
Divorce Rate
America 1820
6.42
0%
0.0%
3%
America 1890
4.39
0%
0.0%
6%
Japan 1925
5.18
0%
0.0%
10%
America 1950
3.31
5%
0.1%
25%
Saudi Arabia 2020
2.28
74%
20.0%
48%
Iran 2020
2.15
57%
6.0%
33%
America 2020
1.8
102%
24.0%
39%
South Korea 2020
0.84
88%
17.0%
42%
Japan 2020
1.34
62%
10.0%
35%
Poland 2020
1.38
84%
29.0%
33%
Sweden 2020
1.8
96%
47.0%
50%
Spain 2020
1.24
102%
47.0%
54%
Finland 2020
1.35
101%
45.0%
56%
Russia 2020
1.5
93%
17.0%
70%
Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.
When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.
This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.
Saudi Arabia was already oil rich by 1980. The World Bank says that female college enrollment in Saudi Arabia has risen steadily and consistently and massively, from a mere 5% in 1980 to 75% in 2020 -- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR.FE?locations=SA --, which correlates well with the decline in TFR during that same period. If there is a religious conservative backlash, they seem to have utterly failed at even arresting female empowerment, much less actually rolling it back, or else female college enrollment would have gone down, not up.
Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women. Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men. "MeToo" feminism is bolstered by dads who don't want to see their daughters run through by the football team, husbands who don't like their wives being seduced at the office, beta men who are resentful of alpha men hoarding the pussy, and elites who find metoo incidents as useful way to take down competitors. Many women on board with #metoo because sex-with-no-strings actually left them very hurt. Unfortunately, everyone has misidentified the problem as being one of lack of consent, as opposed to the problem being inherent to fornication and adultery.
I’m not as familiar with the driving forces behind sex-positive feminism, but for women in the work place, ☝️ this is not only dubious, but appears bad faith and near-infalsifiable since a hand can be waived in the direction of some cohort of elite men and their plan(s) to get more women into the office, which of course they couldn’t and didn’t openly articulate, leaving no historical record.
Post-war, expand high school graduation percentages met with an increased demand for clerical work. Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry). Women found office jobs, which were far less dirty and dangerous, more appealing. And this, among other factors, led to increased participation in the workforce, and specifically by married women, who were less motivated to drop out of the work force as office work was more palatable.
After a couple decades, women began to expect to spend a significant period of their life in the workforce where prior generations had not. And from here, many women, of their own agency, began to pursue higher education and assert themselves professionally.
If you want to subjectively debate whether this was “good”, feel free to embark on that tangent. But if you want to objectively deny that a subset of women, through their own agency, pushed for greater economic opportunity and independence, then you’ll need to show your work.
I did add as a quick edit to my comment "Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men."
In general, fault-lines of policy interest don't actually split men against women. Feminism is the work of one faction of men and women, and anti-feminism has also been the work of one faction of men and women. Feminism was not some victory of women over the opposition of men. It was a victory of certain women done with the support of certain men, often powerful men.
Doubt. I think they were by far most likely to be domestics. I would be curious what percent of unmarried young women in the U.S. worked in manufacturing at its non-war peak -- I would be surprised if it was higher than 15%. I think you are right there was an increase in demand for clerical work between 1920 and 1970 -- but I suspect true need for clerical work has actually decreased since then. But instead we have seen a rise of "pink color" jobs in the hypertrophied healthcare, education and non-profit sector. IMO, these are mostly vanity jobs doled out by the government as sugar daddy instead of a husband. Feminism has created the jobs, not the need for the work created feminism.
Man you argue in bad faith. Where did I say feminism was all women versus all men? Where has anyone said that?
I originally noted the role of elite men in driving feminism. You challenged me in the reply by saying that women's agency also played a role. I replied to clarify that I believe that both men and women played a role in driving feminism.
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