Women's Birth Rate Decline Continues Despite Men Doing More Housework Than Before

Households across the developed world have grown more equal over the past two decades, with men taking on a larger share of chores and childcare than their fathers ever did. Yet birth rates have carried on falling regardless, undercutting a widely discussed theory that framed men's failure to pull their weight at home as the missing piece of the global fertility puzzle.

The theory, laid out by Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin in a paper titled 'The Downside of Fertility', argued that women were having fewer children because too many husbands remained unreliable partners in the home. New analysis of her own data, however, shows the pattern she relied on largely disappears once more countries and more recent figures are included.

The 'Dads' Versus 'Duds' Model

Goldin's argument centres on a distinction between men she calls 'dads', who share housework and childcare fairly, and 'duds', who do not. She wrote that 'the more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable 'dads' and not disappointing 'duds', the higher will be the birthrate in the face of greater female agency.'

Her model suggests that educated women who marry a 'dud' end up scaling back their careers to cover unpaid work at home, while those who marry a 'dad' can raise children without sacrificing income. Because women cannot know in advance which type of man they have married, Goldin argues that national birth rates track the overall ratio of dads to duds in a given country.

Newer Data Undermines the Pattern

The Atlantic's analysis finds that Goldin's central chart only holds together when a narrow and inconsistent set of data points is used. Her graph paired 2019 fertility figures with time use surveys taken in different years across different countries, in some cases over a decade apart.

Finland's survey, for instance, dates to 2010, when its fertility rate stood near 1.9 children per woman, but Goldin's chart plots the country against its lower 2019 rate of 1.35. When the omitted countries and more recent survey data are added back in, the relationship between men's housework share and fertility largely flattens out.

The amount of variation in fertility rates explained by differences in time use falls to roughly two per cent once the full, updated dataset is used. Individual country figures make the disconnect clearer still. In South Korea, the gap between men's and women's unpaid work shrank by 42 per cent between 1999 and 2024, yet the country's fertility rate fell over the same period from 1.4 births per woman to 0.75.

In Finland, a similar narrowing of the housework gap accompanied a fall from 1.9 to 1.3 births per woman. Goldin herself acknowledged the weaknesses when questioned by the Atlantic, saying, 'all the comments that you've raised, I would raise about my own work,' and noting that the disputed graph was 'not a major part of my paper or my research.'

A Theory That Has Failed To Predict the Data

Goldin is not the first academic to make this argument, nor the first to see the data behind it unravel. Her paper builds on a 2000 theory from Australian demographer Peter McDonald and a 2008 study titled 'Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan?', which found a strong link between men's household contributions and national birth rates using data from 2002.

That earlier paper predicted birth rates would recover as men took on more domestic work, a forecast the original NBER study itself made explicit. Using the most recent 2022 survey data alongside 2024 fertility rates, the Atlantic found that relationship has since flattened almost completely.

A separate 2025 Slate article by USC psychologist Darby Saxbe made a related case using its own OECD comparison chart. When the Atlantic attempted to replicate her findings, the results did not match. Saxbe said the discrepancy traced back to her chart's underlying data, which had been sourced with the help of artificial intelligence and appeared to include hallucinated figures.

The fading correlation between household equality and fertility carries real weight for policymakers weighing how to respond to falling birth rates worldwide. If a fairer division of housework will not meaningfully move the number of babies born, governments and employers pushing initiatives built on that assumption may need to look elsewhere, whether towards childcare costs, housing, or economic security, for policies that could actually shift the trend.