For more babies, China must ensure its population policy is fit for the modern woman

Highly educated and with many options before them, young women will no longer accept sacrificing their income while suffering the double burden of a job and housework

The government should initiate policies that reflect society’s changing values if it wants to raise the fertility rate

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Qian Liu

Qian Liu is an economist based in China.

Published: 8:30pm, 24 Oct 2023

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 child rearing 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 labour-market outcomes”.

What does a gender-critical economics perspective suggest about China’s falling fertility rate? For starters, the growing literature on women’s labour-market outcomes shows that bearing a child can have significant negative effects on future employment prospects and salary.

This “parenthood penalty” is usually better understood to be a “motherhood penalty”, since it falls almost exclusively on women. The data makes it clear that women with children work and earn less than women without children, with some economists putting the parenthood penalty at around 20 per cent of income.