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.
