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As every sentient being knows by now, a recent(ish) analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that American women are increasingly bummed. Last week in a much-discussed article on DoubleX, Sharon Lerner blamed our mood on lack of paid maternity leave, childcare, flexible work options, and the like. Commenters seem inclined to agree; I’m not so sure. For starters, I can attest to the fact that not all women are mothers. If insufficient social support for working mothers were behind the trend, we’d expect to see some sort of happiness divide between women without children and women with children, or perhaps between stay-at-home moms and those trying to balance work and family. Wolfers and Stevenson found the opposite:
There are no statistically significant differences in the trends for women with and without children nor are their differences between these groups in the trend in happiness for men (or the subsequent trend in the happiness gap). Along with the decline in marriage has come a rise in single parenthood, both through growth in out-of-wedlock births and through divorce. Thus, we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents, and, to account for the duel burden of working parents, between employed parents and non-employed parents. Once again, we see similar trends in happiness across these groups, casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood, or work-family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women. [emphasis mine]
Note how uncooperatively unideological the data are. There’s not a lot here for social democrats or religious conservatives or (sadly!) market liberals. And as the bloggers at Distributed Republic point out, Wolfers and Stevenson found that female happiness is declining in almost every Western European country they analyzed, paid maternity leave notwithstanding.
The whole conversation about declining female happiness is based on some vanishingly small statistical differences. (Check out this handy graph by Mark Liberman; also his dyspeptic posts here and here.) I find this tiny dip is a lot less interesting than, say, our weirdly resilient birth rate.
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Photograph of busy mom by Photodisc/Getty.
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I agree with Kerry Howley that no one can definitively pinpoint the cause of the happiness trends at this point (if indeed there’s just one cause). But I think there's more to her incontrovertible point that not all women are mothers. The knowledge that becoming a parent will likely mean being overworked and stressed not only affects women’s lives after they have children; it also influences their very decision about whether to do so. Women who are not mothers could be thus be affected by the same policy lapses as mothers.
The growing numbers of childless women are likely related to the policies (or lack thereof) that make it difficult to parent and work at the same time. Roughly one in five American women between 40 and 44 was childless in 2007, according to census figures—twice the rate recorded 30 years before that. It's hard to know what exactly is behind that decision. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics divides women into the “voluntarily childless” (or childfree, as some prefer) and the nonvoluntarily childless. A woman who wants to have children but is physically incapable would be counted as nonvoluntarily childless. But there's no distinction between a woman who makes the clear choice not to have kids and one who ends up without children less by design than because she can’t find a way to fit them into her life. With good reason, many professional women fear that having a child will mean sacrificing all they’ve achieved in the workplace. Note that the top two reasons women gave for putting off pregnancy, according to a 2005 study published in Fertility and Sterility, were that they were “not financially ready” and “wanted to establish career.” Women who wanted children but couldn't afford to have them, however many of them there are, should not be overlooked.
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Sharon, I agree that there is an opportunity cost associated with having children. But just as there is no evidence linking recent female happiness trends to mother-oriented social policy, I know of no good evidence for your claim that social policy is to blame for growing numbers of childless women.
Fertility rates have dropped all over the world in the past 30 years, not just in the United States. The decline is sharpest in developing countries like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, not generally known for their generous parenting subsidies. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. birth rate is remarkably high, and it remains high even when we remove Hispanic immigrants from the equation. France certainly subsidizes motherhood to a greater extent than does the United States, but French women are not having more children than their American counterparts. What needs explaining is not why there are so many childless women in the United States, but why there are so few.
I wrote a long article on fertility trends last year, and in the course of my research I became wary of politicians who think there is a “right” birthrate to be achieved through domestic policy. American women are not a population of breeders to be incentivized toward motherhood whenever politicians want a few more natives around. The further talk of paid maternity leave can be kept from talk of birthrates, the better.
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Sharon, I have to agree with Kerry that there's no evidence to suggest that large numbers of women are yearning for children they couldn't have due to lack of support, and that's dragging down the levels of happiness. There's a simple and likely explanation for why the number of women 40 to 44 who are deliberately childless has grown so tremendously. That's the generation that first came of age when effective contraception and abortion were legal and normalized. Prior generations simply didn't have the choice to avoid motherhood. Now that the choice is given, we've learned large numbers of women will take it.
I'm sure some women would change their mind and have children if they had more support, but I wouldn't put too much faith in survey responses from childless women about finances or career. Folks who've worked in compiling statistics on abortion will be the first to tell you that women who cite "can't afford a child right now" on a survey for why they're getting an abortion often put that because it's easier than admitting what our society tells women they can never admit, which is that they're not particularly eager to have a baby. In an interview I did with Frances Kissling, she said as much. Many women who have every resource available will say they can't afford a baby, because it feels true, even if they technically have the resources necessary to raise a child. I'm a willfully childless person, and I'll admit that I hide behind the financial excuse when asked why I don't have children.
I'll also add that I'm not entirely sure that a debate about why women are "sad" reflects the statistical reality. The data that kicked off this discussion doesn't seem to show a significant enough shift in women's self-reported happiness to draw any real conclusions. As you can see here, there was not actually any real rise in the number of women who said they were unhappy from the '70s until now. All the researchers found was a shift of less than 6 percentage points of women from the "very happy" to the "pretty happy" column. In other words, they're still happy. A shift this minor probably points to a minor cause; my guess is that sitting in traffic alone could account for the difference. At the most, I'd say feminism has created in women a desire to be more and have more, so they are more likely to suffer disappointments that could move 6 percentage points from one column to another. But so what? Men wouldn't take kindly to being told to dial down their expectations and demands so 6 percentage points could move from the "pretty happy" to the "very happy" column, and neither should women.
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Of course abortion and birth control have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life.
I don’t think the issue is just affording a child. It’s also, as I already reported, about not feeling professionally ready, i.e., not wanting to sacrifice hard-earned successes at work. Of course, many people just don’t want children (and, by the way, I have zero interest in coaxing anyone to do it). But for some women—again, we don’t know how many—the decision to have a child is more complicated than simply wanting to or not. Given the lack of part-time and flexible work options, as well as paid maternity leave and sick leave, and affordable childcare, women know that having a child can and often does derail women’s careers. For many, that knowledge is part of the calculus.
Since we’re offering personal stories, here’s mine: I waited quite a while to have children. For a long time, I didn’t feel ready. By the time I did, I encountered age-related fertility issues. I managed to have children anyway, but if I hadn’t, I think I would have felt sad about it.
As for whether the decline in women’s happiness is statistically valid, you can argue it either way—it’s small, but it’s there. What you cant quibble away is the fact that, without the support for working women that largely exists in other countries, life can be particularly difficult for working mothers in the United States. And that’s sad.
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