clovenhooves The Personal Is Political Institutional Sexism Article A solution to declining birth rates? More supportive men, economist finds

Article A solution to declining birth rates? More supportive men, economist finds

Article A solution to declining birth rates? More supportive men, economist finds

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Aug 26 2025, 10:13 AM
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Axios, August 22 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/22/birth-rates-fertility-south-korea

Archive: https://archive.ph/SGwYX

Quote:Men willing to play a bigger role in parenting and house-work, lift birthrates, finds Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, who won a Nobel in 2023 for her work on women in the labor market.

  • She presented her paper "The Downside of Fertility" at the Jackson Hole Economics Conference on Friday morning.
  • "Fertility is higher when men and women share more in household- and child-care, and is lower when men do little in the home," she said.

Quote:The birth rate in the U.S. first started to fall decades ago as the economy expanded. The decline was aided by the advent of the pill. Women suddenly had a greater ability to postpone childbearing — they could marry later, get more education and gain more agency in the workforce.

  • To feel comfortable starting a family, Goldin writes, women needed assurances that caring for their children would be a shared responsibility.
  • "Why have a child if it means giving up one's future income and security and the child's security," Goldin told the conference Friday. "Assuming, if you will, that men can either be dads who will put in the time with their children, or they can be duds," she said, to audience laughter.
  • "Not funny," she added.

Quote:Between the lines: Among some pro-natalists there is a push for women to embrace being "tradwives," taking a more traditional stay-at-home approach to work and family.

  • Goldin's paper demonstrates that pushing for more traditionalism could have the opposite effect.
The bottom line: Looked at through this new paper, the onus isn't on women to become more "trad," but for men to become more dad.

In order for men to become good fathers, they need to be good partners. In order for men to be good partners, they need to view their partner as equal. In order for (opposite-sex-attracted) men to view their (female) partner as equal, they need to rebuke sexism and misogyny. The article frames that in more simpler terms of men doing equal labor in the household, and that's more of like, a symptom. How is it possible to even begin making men more likely to equally do housework, when the manosphere and rising right-wing governments are promising them obedient tradwives as long as they continue promoting systemic misogyny?

These supportive men need to be supportive of all women, not just the one they managed to lock into a relationship. That means an entire change of how social systems operate. Women are wising up and sharing experiences about how trapped one can get in a relationship with a man when she has children with them. People no longer live in a world where they can easily bury their heads in the sand and think about their one little bubble of a nuclear family. Supportive men need to make supportive systems, supportive societies, not just "be supportive" to just "their" children.

Birth rates will continue to plummet until this problem is looked at from an all-encompassing perspective.

Plus, I'm sure nothing gets women riled up faster to have babies than when there are economic and government reports about declining fertility rates and viewing women as means to prop up their country's pyramid scheme governing systems. 🙄 Clown world.
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Aug 26 2025, 10:13 AM #1

Axios, August 22 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/22/birth-rates-fertility-south-korea

Archive: https://archive.ph/SGwYX

Quote:Men willing to play a bigger role in parenting and house-work, lift birthrates, finds Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, who won a Nobel in 2023 for her work on women in the labor market.

  • She presented her paper "The Downside of Fertility" at the Jackson Hole Economics Conference on Friday morning.
  • "Fertility is higher when men and women share more in household- and child-care, and is lower when men do little in the home," she said.

Quote:The birth rate in the U.S. first started to fall decades ago as the economy expanded. The decline was aided by the advent of the pill. Women suddenly had a greater ability to postpone childbearing — they could marry later, get more education and gain more agency in the workforce.

  • To feel comfortable starting a family, Goldin writes, women needed assurances that caring for their children would be a shared responsibility.
  • "Why have a child if it means giving up one's future income and security and the child's security," Goldin told the conference Friday. "Assuming, if you will, that men can either be dads who will put in the time with their children, or they can be duds," she said, to audience laughter.
  • "Not funny," she added.

Quote:Between the lines: Among some pro-natalists there is a push for women to embrace being "tradwives," taking a more traditional stay-at-home approach to work and family.

  • Goldin's paper demonstrates that pushing for more traditionalism could have the opposite effect.
The bottom line: Looked at through this new paper, the onus isn't on women to become more "trad," but for men to become more dad.

In order for men to become good fathers, they need to be good partners. In order for men to be good partners, they need to view their partner as equal. In order for (opposite-sex-attracted) men to view their (female) partner as equal, they need to rebuke sexism and misogyny. The article frames that in more simpler terms of men doing equal labor in the household, and that's more of like, a symptom. How is it possible to even begin making men more likely to equally do housework, when the manosphere and rising right-wing governments are promising them obedient tradwives as long as they continue promoting systemic misogyny?

These supportive men need to be supportive of all women, not just the one they managed to lock into a relationship. That means an entire change of how social systems operate. Women are wising up and sharing experiences about how trapped one can get in a relationship with a man when she has children with them. People no longer live in a world where they can easily bury their heads in the sand and think about their one little bubble of a nuclear family. Supportive men need to make supportive systems, supportive societies, not just "be supportive" to just "their" children.

Birth rates will continue to plummet until this problem is looked at from an all-encompassing perspective.

Plus, I'm sure nothing gets women riled up faster to have babies than when there are economic and government reports about declining fertility rates and viewing women as means to prop up their country's pyramid scheme governing systems. 🙄 Clown world.

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Magpie
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Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM
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Seems a bit over the top to call this a "solution" when the countries being compared either have really low fertility rates or slightly less low fertility rates. Sweden is pointed out as an example of a country with more involved dads, yet they fail to mention Sweden's fertility tends to hover somewhere around 1.5, so still below replacement level. Governments and pro-natalists alike are not happy with those numbers.

Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.
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Magpie
Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM #2

Seems a bit over the top to call this a "solution" when the countries being compared either have really low fertility rates or slightly less low fertility rates. Sweden is pointed out as an example of a country with more involved dads, yet they fail to mention Sweden's fertility tends to hover somewhere around 1.5, so still below replacement level. Governments and pro-natalists alike are not happy with those numbers.

Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.

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Aug 26 2025, 3:08 PM
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(Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM)Magpie Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.

Definitely. I think there is some completely ignored massive elephant in the room regarding the uncomfortable (for nations) question of "what if no matter how good social safety nets are, how supportive men are, how peaceful the world is, there aren't enough women interested in having children?" I feel like this is never even considered and it grosses me out and irritates me.

Part of me thinks that some of the people in power are already well aware that women are not interested in having children even with good social systems (like we see with Sweden and other Nordic countries where "fertility rates" are still not meeting "replacement rate"), and that is why they are all-in on removing women's access to contraception and abortion, creating a less educated populace, and decreasing living standards. They're just going to force it. Liberal vs right-wing countries are each carrot and stick like you say, and they aptly both view women as nothing more than breedable donkeys.
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Aug 26 2025, 3:08 PM #3

(Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM)Magpie Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.

Definitely. I think there is some completely ignored massive elephant in the room regarding the uncomfortable (for nations) question of "what if no matter how good social safety nets are, how supportive men are, how peaceful the world is, there aren't enough women interested in having children?" I feel like this is never even considered and it grosses me out and irritates me.

Part of me thinks that some of the people in power are already well aware that women are not interested in having children even with good social systems (like we see with Sweden and other Nordic countries where "fertility rates" are still not meeting "replacement rate"), and that is why they are all-in on removing women's access to contraception and abortion, creating a less educated populace, and decreasing living standards. They're just going to force it. Liberal vs right-wing countries are each carrot and stick like you say, and they aptly both view women as nothing more than breedable donkeys.

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Chernobog
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Aug 27 2025, 9:50 AM
#4
(Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM)Magpie Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.
Right? It is such copium to think that 1) 8+ billion people exist on this planet due to women's sheer enthusiasm for pregnancy, birth and child-rearing and 2) that there's no need to figure out a way to organize society with population decline and eventual flatline in mind (it's not like literally every other large mammal maintains small populations and causes MAJOR problems when there are too many). It's hard not to be insulted by the rhetorical line that with the right pandering, women can and will be bought, when the truth is our own ideas about our reproductive choices are irrelevant at best and they're trying to stamp out resistance by consistently glossing it over and conveniently leaving it out.

Quote:Clover
I think there is some completely ignored massive elephant in the room regarding the uncomfortable (for nations) question of "what if no matter how good social safety nets are, how supportive men are, how peaceful the world is, there aren't enough women interested in having children?" I feel like this is never even considered and it grosses me out and irritates me.
It is gross! When I see people, especially women and alleged feminists, defending "declining birth rates bad", I want to grab them by the shoulders and scream "Which women are you willing to sacrifice? Which groups of women are you going to pester and coerce to do this unnatural, unnecessary dirty work? Are you going to set up a draft? Will we all be under threat of being randomly be sent to facilities to be raped and impregnated just because you and your cohorts were so unimaginative you couldn't come up with a solution to avoid rape and forcible impregnation?" in their faces. Spittle abounds. 

What other implication are we possibly supposed to glean in the event that neither the carrot nor the stick "solves" declining birth rates? I've unfortunately been exposed to enough grotesquely misogynistic scifi pornography to know that this is the ideal fantasy of pronatalists. "Willing" women may be venerated, but it's the unwilling women upon whom they get to cut loose and have "😈fun😈". The unimaginable horror turns the pronatalist on. They know there will be women who resist, and they want women to resist, so that all this consent they've manufactured will justify the torture they are so eager to inflict on us.
Edited Aug 27 2025, 10:02 AM by Chernobog.
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Chernobog
Aug 27 2025, 9:50 AM #4

(Aug 26 2025, 1:25 PM)Magpie Another thing that bothers me with articles like this is that there's this assumption that women conveniently want the same amount of children their government wants, it's only a matter of using the right carrot (or stick). We couldn't possibly have our own ideas about our reproductive choices.
Right? It is such copium to think that 1) 8+ billion people exist on this planet due to women's sheer enthusiasm for pregnancy, birth and child-rearing and 2) that there's no need to figure out a way to organize society with population decline and eventual flatline in mind (it's not like literally every other large mammal maintains small populations and causes MAJOR problems when there are too many). It's hard not to be insulted by the rhetorical line that with the right pandering, women can and will be bought, when the truth is our own ideas about our reproductive choices are irrelevant at best and they're trying to stamp out resistance by consistently glossing it over and conveniently leaving it out.

Quote:Clover
I think there is some completely ignored massive elephant in the room regarding the uncomfortable (for nations) question of "what if no matter how good social safety nets are, how supportive men are, how peaceful the world is, there aren't enough women interested in having children?" I feel like this is never even considered and it grosses me out and irritates me.
It is gross! When I see people, especially women and alleged feminists, defending "declining birth rates bad", I want to grab them by the shoulders and scream "Which women are you willing to sacrifice? Which groups of women are you going to pester and coerce to do this unnatural, unnecessary dirty work? Are you going to set up a draft? Will we all be under threat of being randomly be sent to facilities to be raped and impregnated just because you and your cohorts were so unimaginative you couldn't come up with a solution to avoid rape and forcible impregnation?" in their faces. Spittle abounds. 

What other implication are we possibly supposed to glean in the event that neither the carrot nor the stick "solves" declining birth rates? I've unfortunately been exposed to enough grotesquely misogynistic scifi pornography to know that this is the ideal fantasy of pronatalists. "Willing" women may be venerated, but it's the unwilling women upon whom they get to cut loose and have "😈fun😈". The unimaginable horror turns the pronatalist on. They know there will be women who resist, and they want women to resist, so that all this consent they've manufactured will justify the torture they are so eager to inflict on us.

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