Volume 21 - Article 3 | Pages 65–74  

Relationships between men´s gender attitudes and fertility: Response to Puur et al.'s "Men’s childbearing desires and views of the male role in Europe at the dawn of the 21st century"

By Charles F. Westoff, Jenny Higgins

Abstract

An analysis published in a recent edition of this journal (Puur, Olah, Tazi-Preve, and Dorbritz 2008) reported that, in eight European countries, men with egalitarian gender attitudes both desired and had more children than men with more traditional gender attitudes. These unexpected findings led us to explore a similar research question with an alternate dataset--the European/World Value Surveys. But we found--without exception--a negative association between men’s egalitarian attitudes and fertility, not only in the selected eight European countries but also in a considerable number of other developed countries. We explore possible reasons for and implications of these divergent findings.

Author’s Affiliation

• Charles F. Westoff - Princeton University, United States of America EMAIL
• Jenny Higgins - Princeton University, United States of America EMAIL

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Learning and reproductive health: Do early cognitive skills contribute to better sexual and reproductive health outcomes among adolescents in Ethiopia?
Volume 54 - Article 7    | Keywords: adolescence, education, education, Ethiopia, fertility, sub-Saharan Africa

Reassessing the U-shaped relationship between gender equality and fertility: A replication and extension of Kolk’s (2019) study using comprehensive gender equality measures
Volume 53 - Article 29    | Keywords: fertility, gender, gender equality, human development, Human Fertility Database (HFD)

Early unintended childbearing and unsecured debt in the United States
Volume 53 - Article 27    | Keywords: demography, fertility, gender, life course, mothers

Neighbors’ social attitudes predict variations in live births among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, United States
Volume 53 - Article 25    | Keywords: Amish, diffusion, fertility, household, proximity, religion, spatial analysis

Analysing migrant fertility using machine learning techniques: An application of random survival forest to longitudinal data from France
Volume 53 - Article 21    | Keywords: fertility, immigrants, machine learning, random survival forest, survival analysis