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Notes -
I think the decline in fertility below 2.1 (replacement rate) can be directly linked to modern day feminism and women's rights. However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies.
For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4.
In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.
Now one may argue that the decline in fertility rate is not due to feminism and women's emancipation but rather due to improvements in wealth of society. However, a counterpoint to this is that faster modernizing societies; in terms of becoming more feminist, tend to have declining fertility rates even when not wealthy nations.
Example- Nepal - 1.8, India - 2.0-2.1.
Based on the above data I would posit that feminist societies result in fertility rates declining to below replacement rates, but once a country is wealthy it is far worse for the population to remain conservative than for it to be a feminist nation due to the fact that conservative rich nations do far worse on population growth than feminist nations.
Conclusion - modern feminism doomed/ saved human civilization to constant steady population decline and that's the best case scenario for population demographics from all the options currently available.
Thoughts?
Do modern Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have strict gender norms? All of these countries have a thriving feminist movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_South_Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Japan#World_War_II
I don't think so. Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey have strict gender norms. I recently read an interesting article about how Turkish government officials and the media ruthlessly promote family values. Apparently over 50% of Turkish daytime television is devoted to marriage shows, where they explicitly promote women getting married. Ankara’s Mayor, Melih Gökçek, has stated that a mother who considers abortion should ‘kill herself instead and not let the child bear the brunt of her mistake.’ There might have been something more in the context or translation but this was in 2012 and he only got criticized for it- he was mayor up until 2017.
I think saying modern Japan has strict gender roles is a bit like someone from Greenland arriving in Inverness and saying "this is a big city!" But then there's Manchester, London, Shanghai and Tokyo. Pre-WW2 Japan had strict gender norms. Afghanistan has strict gender roles. The West hasn't experienced strict gender roles in living memory, we don't know what they look like. This isn't to say that strict gender roles are a good or a bad thing - that really depends on what you think about the Repugnant Conclusion. But I think truly strict gender roles do work at raising fertility, even in fairly rich countries like Turkey.
Admittedly this is just me living here (in Japan), but Japan has pretty damn solid gender norms to this day. As with all generalizations of this sort, there are many many exceptions, and yes, it depends on one's definitions of strict in this case. Women still go about in frocks and heels here--and I mean college students going to class. The biggest changes I've seen in 20 years are not necessarily on the side of women--for whom the glass ceiling is still very much present and the most lucrative work to be found relatively easily is sex work (and you name it, it exists here)--but in men. Men here have slowly (at least in popular culture and what I routinely witness say, on trains) become more dandified and dainty. This could be to some degree a temporary influence of trends in South Korean pop (There's a complex relationship there--South Korean banned Japanese music entirely until 1998 and only then did the Japanese begin thawing attitudes toward K-Pop, which has since become massive here, along with Korean TV dramas). Anyway Japan is no Afghanistan to be sure but it's night and day compared to, say, Australia or the US.
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