sexism causes decreased birthrate?

For some reason or another, there's been a lot of press recently about people deciding to have kids (or not).

In the gym yesterday, I ran across an article in last month's New York Times Magazine entitled No Babies?, that examines some possible causes for Europe's super-low birth rate. Apparently European birthrates recently dropped below 1.3. If that rate is sustained, the population will halved in 45 years (faster if the rate drops lower).

Without having read the article, my guess for the low birthrate would have been that Europeans are deciding they were happier without (or with fewer) children. The answer the article provides is more nuanced, but is not far from that. It points out those European countries that have "greater gender equality...better social commitment to day care and other institutional support for working women" have higher birthrates. I bet the women in patriarchal societies have one child, discover their life now sucks, and decide not to have any more, whereas women in egalitarian societies discover hey, not so bad, and choose to have second or third children.

A quote from the article about the countries with more chauvinistic cultures:
"All of these are societies still rooted in the tradition where the husband earned all the money. Things have changed, not only in Italy and Spain but also in Japan and Korea, but those societies have not yet adjusted. The relationships within households have not adjusted yet.” Western Europe, then, is not the isolated case that some make it out to be. It is simply the first region of the world to record extremely low birthrates.

I guess they better adjust, pronto. Japan and Korea both currently have fertility rates around 1.1, and they may still be dropping.

Another article, in Newsweek, examines the question of whether having kids increases or decreases happiness. A recentl study found that parents "definitely experienced more depression" and "parental depression increases along with the number of children parents have". Of course the researcher got tons of hate mail from parents saying that she must hate her children and so on, but there were some more considered (and more interesting) responses, too.

One blogger wrote:
I like the amateur marathoner metaphor: survey a marathoner in the midst of the race and they'll complain about their legs and that rash and how the race seems like it's taking forever. But when the running is over they are always incredibly proud of their accomplishment. Having kids, then, is like a marathon that lasts 18 years.

Finally, a few days ago I read an article about how guys have a biological clock, too. Apparently older men (starting from mid-to-late 30s) are more likely to produce sperm with damaged DNA, which lowers the rate of conception and raises the rate of miscarriage. So, I guess the moral of the story is, women who want to postpone having children should pick younger guys, to increase their eventual chances of conceiving? Or something.