Why Do Feminist Countries Have Higher Birth Rates?

In this episode, Malcolm notices a surprising pattern in the historical fertility data: in nearly every country where women entered the workforce in large numbers during/around WWII (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.), there was a massive post-war Baby Boom. In countries where female labor-force participation stayed low or stable (Japan, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland), there was little to no boom.

We explore whether “female empowerment” (in the classic 1920s–1940s sense — voting rights, workforce entry, cultural excitement) actually halted fertility decline and temporarily reversed it, while modern feminism and declining gender complementarity may be contributing to today’s collapse. We also discuss vitalism, bigender vitalism, why groypers have low fertility despite their “vitalism,” and why making women feel like valued lieutenants (not house-slaves or girl-bosses) matters for both marriage stability and higher birth rates.

If you care about solving the fertility crisis, this counter-intuitive historical correlation is worth grappling with.Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be doing one of those things where I notice something in the data and I ignore it, and then I think about it for a bit and I’m like, wait a second.

I should pay a lot more attention to this than I am. So one of the graphs that I often like to show is a graph of falling fertility rates since the 18 hundreds. And when the feminist movement really began to pick up steam to show that the vast majority of fertility collapse happened before the feminist movement began to pick up steam.

But then I had this no notice in my head when I was thinking. I was like, you know, I just noticed something about when feminism starts in this movement, which is fertility collapse goes down dramatically. The moment feminism starts in every country, but the UK by the way.

So here on, have on screen a chart of fertility collapse [00:01:00] within the United States and what you can see, Simone, I’m sure you’re familiar with this one.

Simone Collins: No, I know this one. That sort of shows also France seeing a really rapid decline.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s not that one. It’s the one in the United States.

Simone Collins: . Okay. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So what you see here is fertility rates go down. Really rapidly between 1835 and 1850, like as rapidly as after the baby boom. Mm-hmm. And then they go like directly downwards.

You have this incredibly fast fertility downwards motion from 1835 to around 18. Sorry, 1935 or? No, 1940 is about when it ends. Yeah. So it ends at 1940. Mm-hmm. Do you guys know what happened to happen during 1940? Or what happened in the 1920s, 1920s, women got the right to vote. 1940s is not just when you had the baby boomer, but also when you had a, a pretty big feminist wave going into World War ii.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Women were [00:02:00] working in the factories. They were entering the workforce in record numbers. Right. It was pretty, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And what we’re gonna go over here. In this episode is countries where women entered the workforce versus countries where women didn’t enter the workforce. Ooh. And what you might be surprised about is it’s very correlary with those country whether or not the country’s had a baby boom.

Oh. That might actually be the explanatory phenomenon of the baby boom we’ve been looking at is whether female

Simone Collins: empowered.

Malcolm Collins: Female empowerment may have been what? Holy the baby boom. And what’s also very interesting is if you ignore, so let’s say

in this graph, I’m gonna ignore the baby boom and then the, the bust infertility rates after the baby boom.

Fertility rates look pretty stable from 1940 to 2023. Yeah, you see a bit of a downwards motion if you were to put a single graphical line between that, but not very big. If you contrast it with any period between 1835 and [00:03:00] 1940.

Simone Collins: Yeah, if you really blur your vision, it just kind of looks like we hit a floor.

And, and stayed there.

Malcolm Collins: But we know that that’s not a floor because Korea’s gone well below that floor.

Simone Collins: No, I mean obviously, but like in the us like

Malcolm Collins: this grass and we’re going below that floor too. Okay? Mm-hmm. So, and there’s other videos where we have other hypotheses for the baby boom. We hypothesize.

It could have been Les Baby dying. I think that’s probably the. Biggest factor, but it didn’t happen in every country. So it couldn’t be just that. We have a, a, a video where we argue that it’s nationalism plus sort of sci-fi pop culture futurism of the 1950s that that didn’t occur in some other countries.

But here we’re gonna say that, and I still think all of those things played a role here. We’re gonna say another thing that may have played a role as female empowerment, but let’s not just look at this slide. Let’s now look at some European countries here. Okay.

Simone Collins: So,

Malcolm Collins: If we look at France in the UK in terms of fertility bus, what you see in France is that fertility rates have been like, they go down dramatically between 1750 [00:04:00] and 1800.

They are then stable from 1800. To around 1870. And then they go down a bunch between 1870 and around 1920. And then from 1920 until the recent fertility drops, they have been stable.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: You, you have this graph as well, Simone. I, I sent it to you.

Simone Collins: That’s interesting. 1920 was around when the medal of motherhood in France was first launched.

Just as a little aside,

Malcolm Collins: people, now let’s look at England and Wales. Does it buck the trend? Kind of, England and Wales has like a growing fertility until you get to like the 18. Well, it, it’s stable. I wanna say from like 1835, like in the US when it began to go down, up to like 1860 or 70. Then you have the massive decrease between 1860 and 70.

Mm-hmm. And like 1930. And then you have another massive decrease after that. So England is the only country that really appears to buck this [00:05:00] particular trend. And I also note here one of the things that’s very important to remember that when we’re looking at this data. Is that in the, the the baby boom, the baby boom really starts in the countries where it started in the United States and stuff like that.

Typically a little bit before the war and picks up steam during the war, not, not after the war. Which would online with this hypothesis a lot more. Now, before we start going into that stuff, I just need to go over the, the broad statistics that you should know if you’re a fan, because we have talked about this before.

This is not just a phenomenon that you see here. There was discovery done by Aria Babu where she did a chart in Europe about women people’s views towards motherhood. And what you see is it’s a light inverse correlation, but it isn’t an inverse correlation between how misogynistic or how, how gender equal the, the views were about Motherhood’s role and the fertility rate of the country in Europe.

Simone Collins: It’s so much subtle. I mean, she looked at, at pe like how people responded in, [00:06:00] in surveys to questions, like, it hurts the children if the mother works though. That is pretty, you know, in the end.

Malcolm Collins: