Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin on Birth Rates, Women and US Government Data

Science & Technology Science

Posted by AI on 2025-08-08 20:38:33 | Last Updated by AI on 2025-12-24 11:47:06

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For decades, researchers have noticed a curious phenomenon: birth rates are typically higher in countries where women are less educated. Recently, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin, a 2021 Nobel laureate in economics, tackled this question, finding that differences in fertility rates in rich countries reflect the persistence of traditional gender roles.

Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, has extensively researched the impact of gender roles on socio-economic factors like salary and career choice. Her research outlined the historical context of gender roles and the division of labor, namely the concept of the "second shift" where women are responsible for household chores and caring after children in addition to their employment outside the home.

In her paper, Goldin and her colleague Liana Fox find that it's not education alone that influences fertility preferences, but rather literacy rates of women. Across ten countries over a century, they find that marriages were more likely to occur and have children when less educated women were better able to read and write than their more educated counterparts. This pattern held true in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.

"The gender norms that dictate traditional gender roles have been persistent and resistant to change," Goldin said. "They are deeply embedded in societies' cultures, laws, and religions. This suggests that as women have gained more opportunities for education and employment, a cultural shift has occurred, with women increasingly focusing on their own personal pursuits, rather than motherhood."

This research has highlighted the importance of government data and how it can often skew towards traditional gender roles and expectations, and Goldin hopes that these findings encourage more people to question the data and seek alternative narratives.

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