Stephanie Hegarty
Population correspondent
When the US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance made a comment about “childless cat ladies”, he evoked an image of educated, urbanite, career-minded women.
But the picture of who is childless is changing. Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them – in particular lower income men.
A 2021 study in Norway found that the rate of male childlessness was 72% among the lowest five percent of earners, but only 11% among the highest earners – a gap that had widened by almost 20 percentage points over the previous 30 years.
Robin Hadley is one of those who wanted to have a child but struggled to do so. He didn’t go to university and went on to become a technical photographer in a university lab, based in Manchester, and by his 30s, he was desperate to be a dad.
He was single at the time, having married and divorced in his 20s, and was struggling to pay his mortgage, leaving him with little disposable income. As he couldn’t afford to go out much, dating was a challenge.
When his friends and colleagues started to become fathers, he felt a sense of loss. “Birthday cards for kids or collections for new babies, all that reminds you of what you’re not – and what you’re expected to be. There is pain associated with it,” he says.
His experience inspired him to write a book looking at why, external, today, more men like him who want to be fathers do not. While researching it, he realised that, as he puts it, he had been hit by “all the things that affect fertility outcomes – economics, biology, timing of events, relationship choice”.
He also observed that men without children were absent from most of the scholarship on ageing and reproduction – as well as from national statistics.
Hadley has interviewed other men in Britain who are childless, not by choice. They also expressed sadness and loss, and told him that there was “something missing” in their life.
This week, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that births in England and Wales fell to an average of 1.44 births per woman, the lowest rate on record. The US birth rate is at a record low, while in 2022 China reported its first population decline in 60 years.
In almost every country in the world, the proportion of people without children is growing. Statistics are gathered differently around the globe and are difficult to compare but rates of childlessness are particularly high in East Asia, at about 30%. In the UK, it’s 18%.
The rise of ‘social infertility’
For some, this is a choice. For others, it is the result of biological infertility, which affects one in seven heterosexual couples in the UK. For many more like Robin, it’s something else, a confluence of factors – which can include lack of resources, financial struggles, or failing to meet the right person at the right time. Some refer to this as “social infertility”.
Anna Rotkirch, a sociologist and demographer at Finland’s Population Research Institute has studied fertility intentions in Europe and Finland for more than 20 years, and argues that something else may be at play too: She has noticed a profound shift in how we view children.
Like marriage, having a child was once seen as a cornerstone event, something young people did as they embarked on adult life. Now, says Professor Rotkirch, it’s seen as a capstone event – what you do once other goals have been achieved.
Outside Asia, Finland has one of the highest rates of childlessness in the world. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was celebrated for battling declining fertility with world-leading child-friendly policies. Parental leave is generous there, childcare is affordable and men and women do a more equal share of domestic work.
Since 2010, however, fertility rates in the country have declined by almost a third.
“People of all different classes seem to think that having a child is adding to the uncertainty in their life,” Professor Rotkirch explains.
In Finland, the wealthiest women are the least likely to end up childless involuntarily, whereas low-income men are the most likely. That’s a big shift from the past. Historically, people from poorer families tended to transition to adulthood earlier – they left education, got jobs and started families at a younger age.
This trend is happening elsewhere in Europe, too. “Now it’s actually the most disadvantaged people who are the least likely to start a family because they can’t afford it,” adds Bernice Kuang, a demographer at the University of Southampton.
When Dr Kuang surveyed the fertility intentions of young people in the UK, she was surprised by the results. Twice as many 18 to 25-year-olds (15%) now say they will never have children, compared with 15 years ago (7-8%). Many more aren’t sure.
Of all those yet to have children, more than half said they don’t want to or aren’t sure. “That’s a big change from previous generations,” says Dr Kuang.
Those who responded negatively tended to be the most financially insecure. Where young people felt they had a lower standard of living than their parents, they were less likely to want a child.
It makes sense, says Dr Kuang, when you consider that the average age of getting a first mortgage in the UK is the mid-thirties, and parents struggle to find affordable childcare.
“If intentions don’t change, it will be a big social change,” she says. “I’d be interested to see if the UK breaks records.”
The crisis of masculinity
For men, financial uncertainty has a compounding impact on involuntary childlessness. It has been called “the selection effect” by sociologists, where women tend to look for someone of the same social class or above when they choose a partner.
“I can see I was batting out of my league intellectually, and in terms of confidence,” says Robin Hadley. “I think on reflection, selection effect could have been a factor.”
In his late thirties, he met his current wife. By the time they were talking about children, they were in their forties and were unable to conceive. But he says that she helped him gain the confidence to go to university and get a PhD. “I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for her.”
Women are outperforming men in education in 70% of countries worldwide, leading to what Yale sociologist Marcia Inhorn has called “the mating gap”. In Europe, it means that men without a university degree are the group most likely to be childless.
An invisible demographic
Like most countries, the UK doesn’t have good data on male fertility because they only take the mother’s fertility history when registering a birth. This means that childless men do not exist as a recognised “category”.
Some Nordic countries, however, take both. The 2021 Norwegian study found that a substantial number of men were being “left behind”, arguing that “childlessness is highest among the poorest men”, and that “this inequality in fertility has widened over time”. According to its authors, “while much is already known about female fertility… relatively little is known about male fertility”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp81ynn7r4mo