With China’s fertility rate stubbornly low, experts are casting about for ideas to encourage more women to have more children. Yet even after decades of Chinese women pursuing higher education, professional careers, and other opportunities outside the home, such proposals still fail to account properly for gender.
BEIJING – With China’s fertility rate having fallen off a cliff, many experts have offered a variety of advice for addressing the problem. But all of the proposals lack an essential component: a critical perspective on the role of gender.
Because the focus has been on the impact of high childrearing costs on fertility, the career penalty that women incur when they have a child has largely been overlooked. China’s policymakers would benefit greatly from the work of the Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize for economics this year for her research advancing “our understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.”
What does a gender-critical economics perspective suggest about China’s falling fertility rate? For starters, the growing literature on women’s labor-market outcomes shows that bearing a child can have significant negative effects on future employment prospects and salary.
BEIJING – With China’s fertility rate having fallen off a cliff, many experts have offered a variety of advice for addressing the problem. But all of the proposals lack an essential component: a critical perspective on the role of gender.
Because the focus has been on the impact of high childrearing costs on fertility, the career penalty that women incur when they have a child has largely been overlooked. China’s policymakers would benefit greatly from the work of the Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize for economics this year for her research advancing “our understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.”
What does a gender-critical economics perspective suggest about China’s falling fertility rate? For starters, the growing literature on women’s labor-market outcomes shows that bearing a child can have significant negative effects on future employment prospects and salary.