#187 Bargaining for Babies
Fertility
It takes a couple to have a child. They must agree that they want one. How does that work?
A Five-Minute Read
There is a remarkable set of data called the “Generations and Gender Programme (GGP)”. This collects data about what happens inside families. It does that on a huge scale. It looks at results across 19 different countries. There are up to 10,000 people per country. It is a longitudinal study. It looks at the same couples over time. It measures their responses every three years. It also tracks what is happening in their lives. It can shed new light on the decision about “how many children and when” a couple will take.
It Takes Two to Tango
The survey included 33,479 couples in which the woman was of childbearing age for which data was available. Whether they are married (68%) and cohabiting (87%). It asks a simple question:
“ Do you want to have a/another baby now?”
The average age of the women was 33 and the men 36. These couples already had 1.45 children. 22.3% of the women surveyed said that they wanted a baby now. 27.4% of the men said so. There were 27.5% of the couples where one or more of the partners said they wanted a child. In only 16.7% of couples did both partners agree that they wanted a child. Agreement is not a given.
The pattern of agreement and disagreement is interesting. Women disagreed more than the men. The gap between the extent of the male and female disagreement is a clue to fertility. In those countries where women disagreed with their partners more, there was a lower fertility rate. If there are as many men as women disagreeing with their partners the fertility rate was higher. The relationship is obviously different in those couples.
The question is what happened to these different types of couples. Which had children and which not. Clearly there were couples where neither said they wanted a child, but they had one. Most did not. The couples that agreed on having a child had the highest incidence of children. What happens if one partner is in favour and the other not?
It is clear that in these decisions the woman has a virtual veto. The incidence of a couple having a child when the man wants one and woman does not is low. It trends to zero with couples who have children already. A couple that agrees has a three times higher likelihood of having a child than a couple where the man disagrees but the woman wants one. They have a seven times higher likelihood if the woman disagrees but the man wants a child.
Bargaining for a Baby
The survey also contains questions about caring for children. There are six detailed questions of parents about who does the caring: the father or the mother. The questions cover all aspects of caring:
who dresses the child or children,
who puts them to bed,
who takes them to school, day care etc.
who stays at home with a sick child
who helps with homework.
who plays with the children.
For each country it is therefore possible to compute a “sharing index”.
In every country the mother carries the bulk of the caring burden. Women everywhere do more than half of the care. There is, however, a large variation across countries. In Norway men share 40% of the care but in Russia the number drops to 25%. The higher the sharing index the higher the propensity of a woman to want to have a baby. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the index is also strongly correlated with higher fertility. If women are expected to do more of the care, they are less likely to want a child or more children. It is a bargain.
Fertility is also influenced by regulatory and cultural norms around women returning to work. There are strong relationships between desire to have children and the participation of women in the workforce in a particular country. When more women return to work and when women work longer hours the female veto drops. The bargain is stuck within this context.
The bargain revolves around the ability for woman to continue their careers and have children. It is a bargain that is struck in each home. The need for agreement is highest for those couples having their first child. The bargain is all the more real. Career aspirations are high for both partners.
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Another very interesting article; clearly, having a baby is more contractual than many might have thought but probably not a bad thing, at least it is rational! I presume that Norway must have an especially high fertility rate? I also assume the level of immigration is not an overriding factor? I had understood, in London for example, that around 50% of babies were to parents who were immigrants or themselves children of immigrants which could be important for different reasons.