Feminism Didn’t Kill The Fertility Rate

Debunking a popular myth

A popular hypothesis is that feminism is the primary cause of the falling fertility rate. The idea is that women are choosing to have a career over having children. In other words, men are standing ready to have a large number of children, but women are rejecting them and insist that they rather be boss babes than home raising children.

We can test this hypothesis by checking various prediction we can make from this “theory”:

1. The more feminist a country is, the lower the birth rate will be.
2. Men want significantly more children than women
3. Birth rate data should show historical fall, mirroring evolution of feminism in a country.

Anyone who has done any kind of data analysis to determine what factor is important knows we must exclude confounding factors. Ergo, to make this comparison, we ought to compare countries with many similarities.

One of the biggest factors in how societies operate is how rich the country is. Ergo, we should compare rich countries with other rich countries ideally. And preferably poor countries with other poor countries.

Do More Feminist Countries Have Lower Fertility Rate?