[Puffer Fish]

Here's one of the big reasons white women in the U.S. are not having kids: There's a shortage of college-educated men.

Women who are themselves college-educated seem averse to marrying "down", or forming serious relationships with these potential male candidates.

There is now a higher percent of women with college degrees than men, and it also takes younger adult men longer to obtain a college degree, on average. (This discrepancy between genders is even greater for African Americans)

Among whites in the U.S., 56 percent of 4-year degrees are earned by women, and 60 percent of Associate's degrees.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

By the time they were 23 years old, 23 percent of women had earned a 4-year degree, versus 14 percent of men.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archiv ... 092011.pdf

So instead these "surplus" college educated women end up not having kids.

(For non-Hispanic Whites in the U.S. in 2021 the percentage of adults age 25 and older with a 4-year degree was 41.9%.
source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... nment.html )

Looks like there's a similar problem in Australia:
" Fellow demographer Bernard Salt, based on Census data published in March 2012, found it was most competitive for single women of marrying age.
There are 1.3 million single women aged 25-34 living in Australia. In the same age bracket, however, there are only 86,000 single, heterosexual, well-off or "eligible'' men earning above $60,000 a year. "


There's also some anecdotal evidence to suggest that college-educated women who marry a man with lower educational qualifications and choose to start a family are much more likely to only have 1 child.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/better-educa ... g-husbands
https://www.economist.com/news/internat ... pears-rise

While a college educated man is much more likely to marry to a college educated woman than a non-college educated man, there are still plenty of college educated men who start families with non-college educated women. So it's not as if there's "enough" non-college educated women to go around for all the men without a college degree.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archi ... me/274654/

Of women with a 4-year degree now married, 59 percent are married to a man with a 4-year degree or more. About 25 percent of college-educated women are not married.

Compared to males who did not complete high school, men with at least a bachelor's degree are about 11 percent more likely to have married by the age of 46, while for females it's only 4 percent greater.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/artic ... ment-5.htm

This percentage doesn't tell the whole story because the marriages of more educated men last longer than those of men without a 4-year degree.

Among women in the U.S. between the ages of 40 to 44, 20 percent have never had a child, and this percentage rises to 27 percent for women of this age group with graduate or professional degrees.
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010 ... -children/

College educated women are likelier to have fewer children than women without college education:

By the time women reach the 40-44 age group, those who didn’t finish high school averaged 2.56 births per 1,000 women, the highest fertility. Women who finished high school or had any college experience had the next highest fertility, 1.88 and 1.91, respectively. Women who finished college had the lowest fertility — 1.75 births among those with a bachelor’s degree and an even-lower 1.67 for those with graduate degrees,​

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... ldbearing/

Interestingly, however, women with higher levels of education than a 4-year degree are no longer having fewer children than those with only a 4-year degree, which is a change from what the statistics were 25 years ago.
https://voxeu.org/article/highly-educat ... fewer-kids

It's still overall true to say that college educated women have fewer children than those without college.


All this, of course, has big demographic implications, for the future society and the economy. As well as political and social implications.


Also see related thread: Nearly half of U.S. women under 45 are childless (posted in North America section, Sep 2, 2023)

[Puffer Fish]

Some videos

"U.S. birthrate lowest level in 30 years"

Economic woes in rural America
"the fastest growing population in homeless shelters: single moms and their families"

If you look at fertility rates, there's a clear connection. Higher cost of living areas that have higher population densities, higher housing costs, and more employment available for women have lower fertility rates than areas with lower costs of housing, and which either have good paying job opportunities for the man or limited job opportunities available for women.

That is, if you want women to have children, there first has to be enough space (not too much overcrowding), having a family has to be affordable, and it has to not be too much in a woman's interest to have a job.

In many city areas there are lots of job opportunities for women, but the housing costs are also very high, so as a result it's in the woman's best interest to work full time and not have a family. In the country, costs of living are low but also there's fewer job opportunities. That's part of the reason the pace of life is slower and people do a lot more things for themselves, to be self-sufficient, they have more time.

But I think it's more than just economic factors, there really is a psychological aspect. Women want a man who earns more than they do, and so a "career woman" is less likely to get married in the first place or form serious relationships in which they would consider having children. Especially when there isn't a man there who will be providing for those children. (Also makes less sense to take a temporary break off from working to have a child when you're the higher income earner in the relationship)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... g-a-family
So it looks like women are looking for a husband who can provide for her while she stays home and has children.
That can be a tall order these days, with so many households needing two income earners to stay afloat.


As for racial factors, I've also heard it said that many white women (the attractive ones at least) have higher expectations from the man about how much he can financially provide. (This is one of the reasons cited by many lower income white men who choose to be with a woman from a different race)


Really good article from NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upsh ... y.amp.html

Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why.

Wanting more leisure time and personal freedom; not having a partner yet; not being able to afford child-care costs — these were the top reasons young adults gave for not wanting or not being sure they wanted children, according to a new survey conducted by Morning Consult for The New York Times.

But it’s also a story of economic insecurity. Young people have record student debt, many graduated in a recession and many can’t afford homes — all as parenthood has become more expensive. Women in particular pay an earnings penalty for having children.

“We want to invest more in each child to give them the best opportunities to compete in an increasingly unequal environment,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.


Broke men are hurting American women's marriage prospects

There's a devastating shortage of men who have their act together, according to a new study that may not be so surprising to all the single ladies out there.

Research now suggests that the reason for recent years' decline in the marriage rate could have something to do with the lack of "economically attractive" male spouses who can bring home the bacon, according to the paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Family and Marriage.

"Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men -- men with a stable job and a good income -- make this increasingly difficult," says Daniel Lichter in a press release.

Lichter adds that unless your dream man is an Uber driver, the dearth of would-be grooms is prominent "in the current 'gig economy' of unstable, low-paying service jobs."

To investigate the man drought, researchers created profiles of potential husbands, based on real husbands as logged in American Community Survey data. They then compared these hypothetical spouses with actual unmarried men.

They found that a woman's made-up husband makes 58 percent more money than the current lineup of eligible bachelors. This study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses, the study concludes.​

https://nypost.com/2019/09/06/broke-men ... prospects/

[Puffer Fish]

Here's one interesting article I found from The Atlantic.
I've included just selected parts of the article to try to condense it down a little bit and highlight what I feel are the more important parts.

Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men

The struggling American man is one of the few objects of bipartisan concern. Both conservatives and liberals bemoan men’s underrepresentation in higher education, their greater likelihood to die a "death of despair," and the growing share of them who are not working or looking for work. But the chorus of concern rarely touches on how male decline shapes the lives of the people most likely to date or marry them--that is to say, women.

In Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, tells this side of the story. Beginning in 2014, she conducted interviews with 150 American women who had frozen their eggs--most of them heterosexual women who wanted a partner they could have and raise children with. She concluded that, contrary to the commonly held notion that most professional women were freezing their eggs so they could lean into their jobs, "Egg freezing was not about their careers. It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them."

Behind the rise of egg freezing is a larger story of what Inhorn calls "the mating gap." As she notes, in 2012, female college graduates outnumbered male graduates by 34 percent; today, she estimates, nearly 3 million more women than men hold college degrees among Americans ages 22 to 39. Barring a dramatic reversal, this gap will only grow—in the past four years, estimated national undergraduate enrollment has included roughly 3 million more women than men. According to Inhorn, these numbers explain why, today, educated women who want a male partner to parent with are hard-pressed to find someone displaying the characteristics she calls “the three e's--eligible, educated, and equal" (and, I would add, "eager" to commit) as they seek "the three p's of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood." Egg freezing is, as Inhorn puts it, "women's technological concession to a U.S. gender problem."

Clearly, egg freezing is not a sustainable or scalable answer to the problem of structurally mismatched desires and expectations. But does it present a solution for the individual women who choose to undergo it? The stories in her book don’t provide a tidy "yes" or "no"; rather, they raise deeper questions about heterosexual relationships today, ones that have implications for overall fertility rates, the U.S. economy, and the future of the family. Most of all, her book captures the pain of women who struggle to fulfill the human desires for companionship and parenthood, pain that has been too long overlooked in the broader discussions about egg freezing.

The demand for egg freezing has not gone unnoticed by investors, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into egg-freezing "studios" and clinics that aim to make the process more consumer-friendly. In the U.S., the procedure can cost anywhere from $7,500 to $18,000 per cycle, plus annual storage fees of $500 to $1,000 a year. Some patients undergo multiple cycles in order to bank the recommended 15 to 20 eggs that clinicians generally advise for a reasonable chance of a live birth.

About 20 percent of the women Inhorn interviewed froze their eggs for medical reasons, such as before beginning cancer treatment that could potentially harm their reproductive capacity. But much of the book is given over to women’s stories, by turns heartbreaking and infuriating, of dealing with unsatisfactory relationships.

Take Kayla, a professional with an Ivy League MBA, who had frozen her eggs at 38 while dating Matt, until she finally realized after a year and a half that he was "never going to commit." Or Lily, a curator whose long-term partner Jack ran down her reproductive clock over nearly a decade, dangling the prospect of marriage and children but never following through, leading her to freeze her eggs at the late age of 43. Or Tiffany, a woman with engineering and MBA degrees living in Washington, D.C., who, after dating men from all educational backgrounds, still hadn't found a partner and put two egg-freezing cycles on a zero-interest credit card.

Based on these patterns, Inhorn categorizes this army of the "unready or unwilling" into 10 archetypes the women claim are responsible for their dating misery, among them "feminist men" who "claim they are feminist but do not pitch in, pay, or help out, all in the name of gender equality"; "Peter Pans," who are prolonging adolescence "sometimes well into their forties and beyond, with no immediate plans for marriage"; and "younger men" who "no longer believe in dating and don’t know how to do it."

In sociological research, education level is strongly correlated with household income, and together these factors can be a proxy for whether a person is an "eligible" partner. As long as these patterns hold, the growing chasm between college-educated men and women is going to leave some women partnerless.

But beyond these numerical facts, many egg freezers struggle to explain why, despite their best efforts at dating, they remain single. Are these fewer educated men realizing that the numbers are in their favor, and with a limitless supply of women served up on dating apps, they don’t feel the need to commit? Are the women in the book still single because they are stuck dating the "dregs" of the male species, as one woman put it to Inhorn, until a wave of divorces will "release some decent men so she can have a turn"? Is part of the problem that "decent" is often code for "college-educated"?

Nearly three decades ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson cited male joblessness as the reason behind the decline in marriage in some predominantly Black communities (and the pool of available men has shrunk since the late 1970s because of Black men's disproportionately high rates of incarceration and mortality). More recently, economists have documented falling marriage rates in pockets of the U.S. where men have lost manufacturing jobs (notably in sectors facing competition from cheap Chinese imports). Unlike the egg freezers, women in these communities typically do not defer childbearing until their late 30s, but instead have children at earlier ages and raise them on their own.​

Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men. by Anna Louie Sussman, (in Books section) The Atlantic, September 14, 2023