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With birth rates around the world hitting record lows, politicians, think tanks and intellectuals have offered no shortage of solutions. They want to strengthen the family, expand child tax credits or provide free universal child care.
But Harvard University economist and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin says they're overlooking a big part of the problem: dads - or at least the "duds" who give them a bad rap.
"Even though a major factor in the decline of fertility is women's increased agency, the real obstacle is the need for husbands and fathers to demonstrate their commitment in advance," Goldin wrote in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research this month. "The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable ‘dads' and not disappointing ‘duds,'" the more likely educated women are to have babies, she wrote.
Goldin said in an interview that she began investigating fertility not because she necessarily believes population decline is disastrous, but because she's worried about impediments that prevent men and women who want to have children from doing so.
The paper, a culmination of research she first presented to economists at Jackson Hole last year, explores women's decisions about whether or not to have children.
College-educated women, she argued, are more likely to have children if they "can reap the financial and personal rewards from their education while raising their children." And that often depends on having a reliable partner.
When deciding whether to have a child, Goldin wrote, college-educated women calculate the cost of their education, the benefit of having a child and the penalty it will have on their professional earnings against the earnings they'd have if they didn't have a child. In the model, the penalty to women's careers is directly affected by the likely "dependability" of their male partner - a shorthand for their willingness to be involved in child-rearing. Importantly, Goldin assumes women can't know whether their partner will be dependable or not until they actually have a child with them, so they rely on societal expectations.
In her model, educated women are more likely to choose motherhood when they think their partner will share family duties. In other words, when men can't be expected to pick up the slack at home, having a child isn't worth it. (In the model, the expected dependability of a father doesn't affect women who don't go to college.)
• Global divergences
Countries that experienced rapid economic growth such as Japan, Italy and Greece have had relatively large fertility declines, Goldin wrote, because even though women gained more education and job opportunities, they were still expected to handle the bulk of housework. That made it more difficult for them to raise children, and contributed to lower birth rates.
These countries "didn't have sufficient time for generations to adjust their traditions," including gender roles in the home, she wrote. That's in contrast to Sweden, Germany and the US, where economic growth has unfolded more gradually, she said.
The correlation between fertility "and the gender difference in household and caring hours is strong," she concluded.
Moreover, introducing policies that aim to resurrect traditional familial power structures "may backfire and produce even lower birthrates," she said. If men expect their female partners to take on the bulk of household responsibility, women won't want to have children with them.
• Too simplistic?
Her thesis is not without critics.
"Despite, as Goldin shows, modern men being more supportive of women's careers than ever before, fertility and marriage are lower than ever before," Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, wrote in an email. Models that attempt to show relationships between gender equality and fertility "continuously fail to predict reality," he added.
Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, expressed concern that Goldin's definition of "dependability" is too simplistic.
"I worry that we'll go from one very narrow definition of what it means to be a kind of ‘dependable dad,' which is ‘I can depend on you to be the breadwinner,' to another definition, which is a fully fledged, paid-up gender-egalitarian feminist," Reeves said. This wouldn't account for parents' preferences or for couples that shift breadwinner and caregiver roles over time.
While Goldin said her definition of "dependability" can encompass some variation, choices to take lesser-paid positions in order to temporarily assume more home care often have long-term consequences that minimize the return on educational investment. If women "take the part-time lawyer position and men take the full-time lawyer position, when they're 45 years old, one of them is a partner and one of them is nothing," she added.
Nonetheless, Reeves points to very recent shifts in child-rearing behavior among college-educated American men that could test Goldin's analysis in the near term.
Between the three-year period ended in 2019 and the three-year period ended in 2024, college-educated dads have increased the amount of time spent on housework and child care by 4.4 hours per week, often giving up paid work to do so, a study from his institute found. While young, college-educated mothers still do 12.7 more hours of such unpaid work per week than fathers, this change narrowed that gap by 26%. It's a shift Reeves called "dramatic."
"If she's right, will we see an increase in fertility among college educated couples in America?" Reeves wondered. "We'll know for real within five to 10 years probably."
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