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For decades, low fertility has prevailed in large parts of the industrialized world. Childlessness has gone up over birth cohorts of women, and seems to be increasing even faster among men. We use harmonized macro data from a large set of OECD countries to study this emerging gender gap in parenthood. We are able to show, despite substantial between-country variation in childlessness trends, that the gender parenthood gap widens over birth cohorts in most countries. We link this widening of the gender parenthood gap to other gender-related aspects of macrosocial change, including a more dynamic partner market, the mating system, and shifts in educational attainment.

The Sociology Seminar Series is convened by Professor Janne Jonsson. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.