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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?
Note that the nations you've listed in the second category, despite having "strict gender norms", generally have both males and females employed at similar rates.
The link between feminism and fertility is simple -- working women have less time for childraising, and society never restructured itself to account for this loss. The Asian nations you've listed (and also Germany!) all have norms of extreme workaholic culture compared to the Western nations you've listed, and this is likely a significant cause of the reduced fertility in the former.
Whether 21st century feminism is doing well or not is missing the point; the bulk of the damage was done by developing the norm of both parents working in families.
Which ideology actively supports such a state of existence?
And when has it not been the norm for the vast majority of society? Most people probably couldn't afford to leave one half of the family at home, despite how the stereotypical view of a lonely white woman in middle class suburbia waiting for her husband and family to come homme has come to define the "dark times before feminism"
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Or, more specifically, the norm of both parents working at jobs that do not allow children to be present, and requiring childcare until they are nearly adults.
There are plenty of traditional arrangements featuring what one might call a small scale women's cooperative growing and processing food and textiles, and I'm not exactly sure what the arrangement for babies and small children usually looked like, but it was almost certainly not the current model where three or so women tend them full time in one building, while their mothers do their own work for 8 hrs straight far enough away they can't stop back in and visit/nurse them periodically. This is very convenient if you're trying to run a factory or something.
Now that preparing food and textiles at a small scale is not so essential, I would like to see a resurgence of child tolerant work that is actually productive -- work from home seems a bit more flexible. I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, but I find it kind of absurd that my own job is all working with children all day, but there's no possible way to bring my own children if daycare falls through. This is certainly convenient for employers, but at the expense of other values, like encouraging family formation.
Ideally there would be some tolerance for kids in the workplace. Working from home may fix this, but presuming a work environment where the parents need to be in the office, I don't see the issue with having a creche or creche-like area that is near at hand. Perhaps have a 'parents' section within the office space to keep potentially noisy children to an area that causes the least disruption.
Meetings, where serious discussion needs to take place uninterrupted, only take up a portion of the typical office workers activities. Granted some office work requires a high degree of concentration and there should absolutely also be 'quiet spaces' dedicated for this type of work.
None of the above would be perfect though. Having kids in the workplace would reduce net-efficiency of office workers on some level, at the benefit of better work/life/family balance.
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