The panic over American family life has found its villain: The Girlboss. Like The Career Woman before her, today’s college-educated Girlboss, the theory goes, prioritizes work over family. As prominent conservative Katie Miller put it: “Our biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.”
Emma Waters, a Heritage Foundation policy analyst, argued even more bluntly that “’Girl-boss feminism’ has a body count — in birth rates.”
But is The Girlboss really to blame for declining fertility?
With girlbosses drawing ire from the political right amid a national birthrate collapse, Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin redirects attention to men, who have adapted unevenly to rising female educational attainment and economic agency. She’s justified in doing so.
Goldin has a knack for introducing pithy concepts that explain complex economic dynamics. Adding to a corpus of bangers that includes “greedy jobs” and “the quiet Revolution,” Goldin coined the phrases “dependable dads” and “disappointing duds” to describe a problem facing women weighing careers and children. She argues that for a college-educated woman, mate selection amid uncertainty — will he be a dependable dad or a disappointing dud? — puts her hard-earned wage premium at risk. Uncertainty begets delay, and delay begets, well, fewer kids.
But by focusing on women in the top half of the socioeconomic distribution and the dilemma they face in the marriage market, Goldin sidelines the women most exposed to disappointing male duds: those without bachelor’s degrees. As Marc Novicoff pointed out in a critique of Goldin in The Atlantic, these women “are shifting toward childlessness faster” than women with degrees.
If anything, Novicoff may be understating just how misleading the hand-wringing over college-educated women really is. In a new analysis of recent marriage and fertility data, we find that among college-educated American women, rates of motherhood and marriage are higher than they were a generation earlier. The real crisis lies among Americans with less education and income — the country’s socioeconomic bottom half.
