Do men hold the key to increasing births?

The focus on women's choices misses a clear predictor of global fertility rates

Happy Father’s Day! I have a new piece out in Slate today arguing that the pronatalist conversation has missed an opportunity by concentrating on women’s reproductive decisions and not men’s role in shaping those decisions. Having kids comes with a lot of unpaid labor, and when men take on more of that labor, the childbearing bargain gets better for women. If you examine the link between men’s participation in unpaid household labor (housework + childcare) and fertility rates in OECD countries (that is, industrialized democracies), you see a strong relationship. Male attitudes about housework run the gamut from South Korea, where men rarely pitch in at home and birth rates are the lowest in the world, to the low birth rates and more traditional (but rapidly evolving) gender roles found in Southern European countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy, to the wealthy Northern European countries where paternity leave is enshrined in policy and birth rates are higher-than-average.

As I wrote in the piece, having kids brings a lot of additional unpaid household labor. At the level of the individual family, there are essentially there are two solutions to the problem:

1. Disempower women so that the opportunity cost of motherhood goes down and they will increase their participation in unpaid care labor due to a lack of alternatives.

2. Encourage both men and women to participate in the paid work force but increase the domestic contributions of men so that women’s unpaid domestic labor burden is reduced.

The idea to write this article came from a

Francis Fukuyama

piece that I restacked a while back. Fun fact: I went to the same summer nerd camp as Fukuyama, albeit a few decades later. His book, The End of History, came out just a few years before my cohort’s summer. We all snarked about whether it would age well, but none of us anticipated the rise of Trump and populist authoritarianism. Fukuyama has since revised his predictions about the success of neoliberalism. In any case, in his piece about gender relations, Fukuyama wrote, correctly I think, that “Educated women want to work. When they live in still-patriarchal societies like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan where they are channeled into traditional female roles, they revolt either by reducing the number of children they have, or by delaying marriage or avoiding marriage altogether. This is what has led to the disastrously low birth rates in much of developed East Asia, and many parts of southern Europe.”

Fukuyama’s article piqued my curiosity to look at the actual data and see whether there really was a relationship between traditional household gender roles and birth rates. I was surprised to not only find a detectable trend, but a much stronger and more consistent one than I would have guessed.

A key point in my Slate piece is that there are basically two paths towards a higher birth rate. One is the poor country path: get women out of the workforce and into the home having larger families, as was the case during higher birth rate times in our own history, and as is also the case in the countries with some of the highest birth rates in the world, like those in sub-Saharan Africa. Those countries have high teen marriage and pregnancy rates, and their women hold little economic or political power. The “disempower women” formula seems to work for keeping birth rates high, but it comes with costs that most of us don’t want.

The other model is the wealthy country path, the one in which women continue to participate in the paid economy. The wealthy country path requires more gender egalitarianism, generous paternity leaves, and greater willingness among men to step up and help with kids.

I sourced the data for the Slate piece from OECD Total Fertility Rate (TFR) data and OECD time use statistics on unpaid labor. I opted to focus on OECD countries specifically in order to make the wealthy-country argument. For TFRs, I tried to get the most recent data (2022, 2023, 2024) I could find. For the unpaid labor stats, I found a few different ways to break this down. There is OECD time use data that includes metrics for men’s time in housework, and separate data on men’s time spent providing unpaid care labor. I wanted to look at men’s shares relative to their partner rather than at absolute time, to try to get at the gender dynamics undergirding the division of labor. Depending on what type of share I looked at (housework, care work, or combined), the results shook out a little differently but the overall trends looked the same, with South Korea in the bottom left corner of my chart, followed closely by Japan and Southern Europe, and Northern European countries in the top right. Sometimes the countries in the middle (Austria, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc.) ended up in different places, but since my goal was to show an overall ballpark trend rather than produce a peer-reviewed data analysis, I didn’t sweat the slight differences between datasets too much. Depending on the specific data I used, the correlation coefficient was generally between 0.30-0.60, what we’d consider to be a moderate-to-strong effect.

In order to make the actual charts, I got help from the Pro version of ChatGPT 4o and from Claude.ai (I iterated between the two so I could cross-check their results). I asked both programs to give me a .csv dataset of the raw data plus the code they used to make the chart so I could also reproduce the figures on my own. I tried dozens of iterations of the charts. Here is one that Claude.ai came up with, but it was hard to see the country labels:

I ended up liking the cleaner ChatGPT version better; here’s the one that I ended up using in the Slate piece, with a trend line added.

And here’s one of Claude’s attempts at charting the same underlying data - again, hard to read the labels.

I did decide to drop an outlier, Israel, since its TFR is so much higher than the other countries I charted. Israel is somewhere in the middle of the pack on men’s contribution’s to unpaid household labor, but it has a TFR of 2.89, a big jump from the next highest country (France). Israel has its own reasons for its high TFR, including an ultra-Orthodox Haredi population with very high birth rates. In some ways, you could argue that Israel combines the poor country approach to fertility (driven by a more traditional religious minority) with the wealthy country approach (a more progressive, gender egalitarian modern country with supportive family policies). But birth rates are high even within secular Israelis, so the presence of the Haredi does not explain all of these trends. It’s possible that there’s a social contagion effect that happens when some sectors of society have a lot of kids, such that even the less religious folks want to have them too. Here’s a version of the chart with Israel included:

The last section of my Slate article focuses on why we rarely consider male household contributions when we talk about birth rates. The more pronatalism takes I read, the more I think of the discourse as a prism, reflecting your own preferred worldview back to you. Why is the birth rate dropping? Should we blame inadequate family benefits, or housing shortages, or intensive parenting, or existential despair, or lack of religiosity, or climate anxiety, or smart phones and video games that keep us from coupling up in the first place, as

Alice Evans

has persuasively argued? It’s probably some combination of all of the above, but it’s hard to find explanations that can explain the trends, not just within one country, but across countries. When it comes to modifiable factors, men’s contributions to household labor might be one that we haven’t sufficiently explored. Generous, earmarked, incentivized paternity leaves are clearly worth a try, and seem to be helping in the Nordic countries. Workplace and culture change that encourages men’s fatherhood participation seems worth trying too. Another solution is just to pay people, both women and men, to stay home with young kids and do the unpaid care work that no one wants to do.

As I discuss in the article, one barrier to father-focused pronatalism comes from our understanding of what kinds of work are “natural” and should be naturally preferred by members of each gender. We might think it’s natural for women not to engage in paid work and for men not to engage in unpaid household work. But a closer look at the anthropological record reveals that women have always contributed material resources to their families;

Elena Bridgers

and others have unpacked this in detail. We also know, from my research and the work of other researchers, that men’s brains and bodies adapt successfully to fatherhood and that men have the skills to parent and run the household. As I wrote in Slate:

“Men are very capable of adapting to parenthood and providing sensitive care, but they (just like mothers) benefit from time and practice. We can reframe parenthood as a form of skilled labor instead of an innate instinct, and that provides room for both men and women to excel as parents. The same is true for chores and other forms of domestic work. There’s no rule book that says that only women are good at meal planning or grocery shopping or laundry folding or any of the other tasks that keep a household humming. Housekeeping is a form of project management just like software engineering or building construction, and even stereotypically male skills – like spatial organization or mathematical ability – come in handy when organizing a cupboard or figuring out how many eggs are needed for a week’s worth of breakfast.”

Of course, many mothers want to home with their kids, and many men enjoy paid work. We don’t need to completely invert traditional gender roles in order to raise birth rates. Rather, I’m arguing that couples should endeavor to solve the unpaid labor problem together, in the way that best fits each partner’s goals and interests, rather than defaulting it exclusively to women.

Ultimately, I think much of the birth rate conversation circles back to how we think about the value of care work, and that’s the final point I tried to make in the Slate piece. Men’s reluctance to participate in unpaid domestic work is not because they lack skills or interest, but rather because men are raised to regard their time as valuable, and our society does not value time devoted to domestic work. Yet, conversely, we see greater respect for parenting and early childhood education in Scandinavian countries with high father involvement. As I say in Slate, in these countries, “Childcare is not seen as a personal favor that women do for their families, but as a responsibility shared by all adults. Male involvement may help to legitimize and elevate the perceived importance of domestic work.” Indeed, there’s a considerable body of evidence showing that when men dominate a particular field, the pay is higher. When women enter the field, the pay drops. Given its long association with femininity, we particularly undervalue and underpay occupations that involve care, like daycare, eldercare, social work and preschool teaching. If getting men into care roles raises our perception of their value, we all benefit.