The rise of tradwives might have some convinced that embracing traditionalism is the key to raising birth rates in the United States. But what if the solution was actually men stepping up more? 

A new paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has found that countries where men take on more of the household labor and child care — in other words, those who buck traditionalism’s standards of the provider husband and homemaker wife — have higher fertility rates. 

Goldin, who teaches economics at Harvard, found that women want to make sure their partner will share the load with them before deciding to have kids. 

“Why have a child if it means giving up one’s future income and security and the child’s security?” she said at an event last week discussing the findings. 

Fertility rates have declined globally, and each time those dips have come after improvements to women’s employment, education and reproductive rights, Goldin found in her research. In the United States, rates started to take a sharper nosedive after the Great Recession, driven in part by college-educated women who delayed having children. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the birth rate dropped from 106.3 births per 1,000 women in 2007 to 56.7 per 1,000 by 2024.

“They have invested in their education and want to ensure their careers before they have their children,” Goldin wrote. “For some, it will mean that they will delay sufficiently that they will not have children.”

But women obtaining more financial autonomy isn’t the primary reason there are fewer babies, Goldin argues. The real problem, she found, is the kind of support — or lack of support — women are receiving from men. 

“Even though the major factor in the decline of fertility is increased women’s agency, the real downside or obstacle is the need for husbands and fathers to reliably demonstrate their commitment,” Goldin wrote.

To isolate that cause, her paper studied two groups of countries: The first (including Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the United States) has somewhat low fertility rates that started taking a dip in the past several decades. 

The second group (including Greece, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Portugal and Spain) has the lowest fertility rates in the world, which have been sharply declining in recent years. Women in these countries, where economic modernization is relatively new and gender norms have not yet caught up, are more likely to delay having kids or forgo it altogether if they can’t find a partner who will help them carry the load. 

Women in Japan and Italy spend about three more hours in unpaid house and care work a day than men, whereas in Sweden and Denmark, the difference is 0.8 and 0.9 hours, respectively. In South Korea, the country with the lowest birth rate in the world, gender norms are so rigid and the division of labor so unequal that women have begun to reject marriage and childbirth altogether, part of a growing movement known as 4B.  

Countries in the first group, including the United States, have societies where cultural norms have shifted as a result of economic modernization over the course of decades. Women have been joining the American workforce in significant numbers since the 1970s, and they’ve been about half the workforce since 2000. American men today are more likely to take on more household labor, a gap that has been narrowing annually, though that division is still not 50-50. 

Last year for example, 87 percent of women and 74 percent  of men spent some time on household activities on an average day. In households with children under six, women spent an hour more a day than men providing child care. A decade earlier, in 2014, only 65 percent of men said they spent time in household activities.

Other policies, such as government subsidized child care and federal paid leave — neither of which the United States has — could play a role in improving the birth rate as they have in Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden, but they would not have a larger impact than men taking on a more equal role. As Goldin notes, Japan also has extensive coverage for fertility care and more than 30 weeks of paid paternity leave, but its birth rates remain among the lowest. 

In the United States, where fertility rates hit a record low last year, the growing right-wing pronatalist movement has called for women to stay at home and have more kids to avert a worker shortage and economic collapse. President Donald Trump has expressed that he wants to see a “baby boom” and is hoping to award a “medal of motherhood” to moms who have six or more kids. Vice President J.D. Vance has criticized “childless cat ladies.”

Most of those arguments put the onus on women to leave the workforce and focus on childbearing. The amount of help men are providing isn’t part of the conversation.

But in an economy where women are responsible for half the labor force, and have been for 25 years, the solution isn’t as simple as undoing all of that.  

“Reversing progressive change,” Goldin notes, could have the opposite effect and “lower the birthrate even further.”