The rise of tradwives might have some convinced that embracing traditionalism is the key to raising birth and fertility rates in the United States. But what if the solution was actually men stepping up more?

A new paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has found that countries where men take on more of the household labor and child care — in other words, those who buck traditionalism’s standards of the provider husband and homemaker wife — have higher fertility rates.

Goldin, who teaches economics at Harvard, found that women want to make sure their partner will share the load with them before deciding to have kids.

“Why have a child if it means giving up one’s future income and security and the child’s security?” she said at an event last week discussing the findings.

Fertility rates have declined globally, and each time those dips have come after improvements to women’s employment, education and reproductive rights, Goldin found in her research. In the United States, rates started to take a sharper nosedive after the Great Recession, driven in part by college-educated women who delayed having children. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the birth rate dropped from 106.3 births per 1,000 women in 2007 to 56.7 per 1,000 by 2024.

“They have invested in their education and want to ensure their careers before they have their children,” Goldin wrote. “For some, it will mean that they will delay sufficiently that they will not have children.”

But women obtaining more financial autonomy isn’t the primary reason there are fewer babies, Goldin argues. The real problem, she found, is the kind of support — or lack of support — women are receiving from men.

“Even though the major factor in the decline of fertility is increased women’s agency, the real downside or obstacle is the need for husbands and fathers to reliably demonstrate their commitment,” Goldin wrote.

To isolate that cause, her paper studied two groups of countries: The first (including Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the United States) has somewhat low fertility rates that started taking a dip in the past several decades.

Read the full article about fertility rates in countries where men do more child care by Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th.