There’s a common factor in countries where birth rates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal. Last year, Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called Babies and the Macroeconomy, aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birth rates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy. The lowest-fertility countries, Goldin found, modernised so recently and rapidly that social norms around gender equality didn’t have time to catch up. That left women with far more economic opportunity but not much more help from their husbands at home. Between 2009 and 2019, for example, the average woman in Japan spent 3.1 more hours a day on domestic work than men. The average Swedish woman spent 0.8 more hours than men.
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In the most unequal countries in Goldin’s analysis, men wanted to have more children than women did. That makes intuitive sense, given that women would have to shoulder most of the burden of child care. “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear,” Goldin wrote.
Many women, it appears, simply don’t want to get stuck with all the domestic drudgery that comes with raising children, and there’s little evidence that state subsidies can make traditional social arrangements more appealing. Hungary spends more than 5 per cent of its gross domestic product on its family policies, a greater percentage than the United States spends on defence. But while the fertility rate rose a bit in the years after the new policy was instituted in 2019 – when the total fertility rate was 1.55 children per woman — it has since sunk to 1.38.
According to a Pew poll last year, 57 per cent of American young men say they want children someday, compared to only 45 per cent of young women. Unfortunately, these men are getting the wrong message from our leaders about how to make themselves attractive prospects as fathers. The administration is led by an old-fashioned sexist who has bragged that he has never changed a nappy. “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids,” Trump once boasted to a radio host. Elon Musk has taken this notion to grotesque lengths; a Wall Street Journal exposé describes him hitting up women on the internet to incubate the legion of children he hopes to breed in advance of a coming apocalypse. While he has 14 known children, the Journal reports, the real number could be much higher.
Meanwhile, the anti-feminist influencers who form the White House’s informal brain trust and echo chamber tell their listeners that spending too much time with one’s own children is effeminate. “Everyone should look at their father like a superhero,” said Andrew Tate, a high-profile misogynist with powerful allies in the administration. “It’s hard to be a superhero if you’re home every day arguing with your wife changing diapers. That’s not what a man should do.”
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in one 2022 survey, a majority of young women said they probably wouldn’t date a Trump supporter. The most recent season of the reality show Love Is Blind dramatised this political mismatch, with two progressive women ditching their fiances over their politics. Growing alienation between the sexes will naturally make it harder for them to pair up and have kids.
One way Trump could help heal this rift is by going away.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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