Why aren’t women having children? Ask men

To be a woman is to know that no matter your circumstances in life, you will be asked about children by more people and on more occasions than you can possibly imagine.

First, the obvious question: do you want them?

If the answer is yes, follow-ups will include (but will certainly not be limited to): how many? When are you going to start trying? Do you have names picked out? Was the pregnancy was planned? Now that you have one when are you going to start trying for the next?

If you don’t want children, you can expect variations on the following: why not? Aren’t you worried you’ll regret it? Don’t you want to experience that kind of love? Who will care for you when you’re old? What does your partner think about your decision? Isn’t that selfish? Did you have a difficult upbringing? Seriously, why don’t you want children?

Whichever category you fall into, if you are a woman, these kinds of questions will follow you around for the better part of two decades.

But recently, these queries have been condensed down to just one overriding question: Why aren’t women having babies?

Usually, it comes with a tone of concern and frustration, like a hand-wringing mother desperate to make a small child understand that the stove top is not to be touched under any circumstances.

In some ways, it’s a reasonable question. In Australia and many other parts of the world, the declining fertility rate (the number of babies born per women) is now well below the rate of replacement (the number of children needed to be born to keep populations at their current levels), which raises valid questions about the economy, the jobs market, migration, housing, ageing populations and just about every other policy area you can think of.

The problem with the question – and the desperate search for solutions it invariably inspires – is that it is almost never followed up with an equally important counter: why aren’t men having babies?

Thanks to decades of surveys, studies and reports from around the world, we have a detailed understanding of why women are choosing to have fewer children than previous generations. Or none at all.

While it’s a complex, nuanced and deeply personal issue, there are common denominators like the cost of living, the motherhood penalty, quality of life, environmental concerns and not meeting the right person.

And yet, when you go looking for men’s stories in the data, it quickly becomes apparent that they’ve either been left out of the research entirely or seen as an addendum at best, despite playing an essential role in creating the miracle of life.

“Men are absolutely an afterthought in this space,” demographer and senior lecturer at the Australian National University Dr Liz Allen tells me. “And so that means everything we talk about always comes back to women.

“The questions that are asked in data collections give us a picture of what we know; they give us a picture of reality. So the trouble is that when we don’t have a complete picture of reality, our notion of what that reality is, is skewed.”

By only asking half of the population about parenting, Allen says, which includes historically only asking women in the national census about the number of children in a family, “from the very get-go, the notion of parenthood is via a motherhood lens”.

And that knowledge gap has not only left policymakers scratching their heads at how to address this issue, but also allowed armchair experts (read: male podcasters and far-right conservative cranks) to surmise what’s going on and lay blame as they see fit. In this version of reality, these increasingly mainstream voices say that all men are desperate to be fathers, but highly educated career-obsessed women with access to birth control are selfishly withholding parenthood from them.

When a man I barely know recently asked me if I was worried that my husband might one day leave me for a younger woman because we aren’t having children, I felt like I had been sucker-punched. Not only because of how astonishingly insensitive he was, but because in his mind, men like my husband have no autonomy over a major life decision. It’s simply my way, and he’s trapped on the ride like a hostage.

Allen says that by not having detailed data on men, “we’re not able to balance these kinds of conversations”. Of the limited information we do have, though, it appears that “just as there are women who want to have children and women who don’t want to have children, there are also men who mirror the same, and by not including men in that story, we’re excluding them from the equation”.

I know this is true anecdotally at least because when I’ve asked my own male friends and family members about their decisions around kids, their reasons are similar to women’s – and just as considered. Some never settled down, others changed their mind when they met the right person. Some worry about the impact to their careers and the cost of raising a child, as well as what kind of world their babies would grow up in. A number want to take extended parental leave but worry about how they could afford it when they are the primary breadwinner.

What really struck me in these conversations, though, was how much men opened up once we started talking. They were willing to be vulnerable and surprisingly candid. It seems they were just waiting to be asked in the first place.

Katy Hall is a senior editor and regular columnist.

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