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Emily Elias: Having a child is a huge decision, and in the UK, it seems that there is a drop in the number of babies being born each year. But, what’s more interesting than that statistic is the possible explanations as for why. On this episode of the Oxford Sparks Big Questions Podcast, we are asking, why are birth rates falling in the UK?

Hello, I’m Emily Elias, and this is the show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of Oxford and we ask them the big questions. And for this one, we have found a researcher who is minding the fertility gap.

Dr Paula Sheppard: I am Dr Paula Sheppard I am an evolutionary anthropologist based at the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. And I am, really working in the human sciences. And my work sort of juxtaposes or meets at the intersection of demography and evolutionary anthropology. So the question of sort of low fertility is of interest to demographers, but also of interest to evolutionary anthropologists, because from an evolutionary perspective, it’s also strange that people are having fewer children.

Emily: It’s the why of why is this happening, I guess.

But before we get into that, do you mind just giving us a quick sort of rundown of what are the current birth rates in the UK? What do the numbers specifically say?

Paula: So the fertility rate in the UK at the moment is down to 1.56, I think, so just under 1.6, which is really quite low. I mean, it’s about the same as the average across Europe, where birth rates go as low as, I think Malta’s is hovering around just one child per woman on average, and the highest is France. But even France, we’re still underneath what’s called replacement rate. Replacement rate is two children per couple, so that you sort of replace the number of people. So that’s the sort of general picture in Europe. It’s been going on for… This is known as a demographic transition, where as countries get richer, people start having fewer children. And this has been going on for more than a century. You know, as countries get richer, child mortality goes down. So if children are less, children are dying, then, people don’t feel they need to have as many children. But more recently, sort of, since the sort of 60s, we see these rates drop to very, very low levels, which is kind of even more puzzling to demographers because you would think that people wouldn’t want to have so few children that they’re not even replacing themselves.

Emily: Do we even have any sort of theories onto why this is happening, then?

Paula: Beyond the sort of wealth of countries leading to lower infant mortality, there’s been a lot of sort of educational expansion across Europe. So women getting more into education over the last sort of, 50 years than men in fact. And coupled with this, then you end up with situations where work and family life are not compatible. So it’s not to say that the women have suddenly started entering the workplace, women have always worked. But the fact that working, the type of work that we do is not compatible with raising children, has caused a lot of this. So it really comes down to more like a kind of gender equality kind of argument. So as women got more autonomy, making household decisions, more power, they have to make some kind of compromise between raising children and having more, kind of, autonomy in the workplace.

Emily: It’s that, we can’t have it all sort of trope; doesn’t quite work out in real life.

Paula: Exactly. Yes, I mean, it’s to do with changing work conditions, right, that hunter gatherer women work, but they have children as well. They manage to make that work because they can take their children to where they’re foraging for food. But we, we can’t do that.

Emily: You decided to study this more in depth. Can you tell me about the study you did? How did you set it up?

Paula: Right, so we did a study in the UK only. It’s a kind of two part study. There’s a qualitative element where we ran a bunch of focus groups asking people what the barriers are to reproduction in the UK. So the thing that I was quite interested in is even though fertility rates are low and people want small families, people want two children, there is still a two child norm in the UK. But despite this, people are not actually getting even those small families. So you find that, a lot of people are just having one child and then they stop or they don’t even have kids at all. And a lot of this is driven by, sort of, waiting later and later in life to even start a family. You know, the average age at first birth in this country for women is around 30. But a lot of women – that’s only the average – so a lot of women are actually waiting till their late 30s and then you run into sort of other issues of the ability to conceive, or fears about difficult pregnancies. And also just people change their minds that late you’ve had a baby and you realise it’s really hard work because you’re 40 now. And so you decide, well, actually, let’s just stop there. So this is called the fertility gap, right? The difference between what people say they want and what they actually go on to get. And this is not just for women, it’s for men as well. So this study, sort of, proposed to do two things. We went out and asked people, why are you leaving it so late? What are these sort of things that are standing in the way? And then with the data from that, we ran an experiment which is like an online sort of experiment, it’s called a discrete choice experiment, where you sort of force people to make decisions and you get this sort of, you elicit their preferences.

Emily: And so the focus groups that you looked at and the people that you asked, what kind of people were they, what was the makeup of them?

Paula: Right. So we were interested in men and women separately in a way, because obviously couples make these decisions together, right? It’s not just one single person deciding about having kids. But we were interested to see if there were differences between what men wanted and what women wanted. And then we also, divided people by their educational status. As I said earlier, education has been a huge driver of delays in fertility across Europe. It was quite interesting to look at within educational groups what’s going on, because it’s not to say that uneducated people are also not delaying, right. They are too, and having lower numbers of children. So we split the groups into those who had a university degree and those who did not. So quite a sort of blunt cutoff, but it actually turned out that we saw more differences between the educated and lower educated than between men and women.

Emily: What did you find?

Paula: We found lots of stuff! So, you know, everybody, if you ask people, they say, what’s standing the way? Well, people say it’s finances, right. Childcare is expensive and so on. And of course, finances were on everyone’s, sort of, list. But interestingly, what came out really strongly was social support. So support from partners, support from parents for higher educated women, support from friends as well. They wanted to know that their friends were also having kids was important. But having your parents nearby was important. And that’s kind of interesting because you see this in a lot of anthropology. There’s a kind of concept of cooperative breeding or alloparenting, where people have other people help them raise children. You know, the old “it takes a village to raise a child” kind of idea. Well, this is very true, and people were saying that they really wanted support from families. Higher educated women were saying that they wanted support from their husbands, from their partners. It was not really about a breadwinner model, bringing home the bacon kind of thing. It’s more about hands on co-parenting, changing nappies, all of that stuff. Whereas for the less educated women, they were more interested in partners just being there, being in a stable relationship, that the relationship didn’t break down and they were more interested in support from their parents. A lot of women were saying things like, well, if my parents are not nearby, which is the case of course in the UK, a lot of people don’t live near their parents, then you know, we need to get some other kind of childcare. So this kind of third party childcare is what it comes down to, and of course that is financially driven – it’s very expensive in the UK.

Emily: And how long are people willing to wait for… to get what they want. To get either to that stable partnership, or to have that hands on partner or somebody who’s able to help them raise the child?

Paula: That’s a very good question. With this discrete choice experiment methodology you can calculate something called ‘willingness to pay’ and what we’ve done here… So usually this method is used to calculate something like how much is someone willing to pay for a product, right? It’s like a consumer behaviour model. But we’ve sort of modelled this as willingness to pay in reproductive time. Right. Just like you’ve said, how long are people willing to wait? And were people willing to wait a long time? I mean some things are way more important than others. So for having a supportive partner, for example, could see people wanting to wait up to eight years, which sounded hugely long. But if you think about when women are having babies, instead of having babies in your mid 20s, you’re having babies in your mid 30s. Well then that doesn’t seem implausible, right? And it ranges from about the less important things, only sort of a year or so, but the more important things like partner support, finances and family support, we’re talking four, five, six, seven years. For non university educated men in fact, who were quite interested in neighbourhood quality, they were willing to wait 105 months for being able to live in a nice neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that was going to be greener and have better schools and so on before having a child.

Emily: So interesting. I mean, then if people are willing to wait all of this time in order to get the sort of conditions that they want before they have children, does that then further complicate this fertility gap? Like, all of a sudden they get to an age where maybe it becomes harder for them to even have children?

Paula: Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So you do run into fecundity issues – even for men. It’s, you know, although men can conceive a child much later than women, there are still health issues surrounding late fertility for men. But again, it’s there, there is this fecundity issue, there is issues with more difficult pregnancies, higher incidences of Down syndrome and so on. But also people change their minds. So, a lot of this fertility desires, sort of, literature talks about people’s intentions, but of course people’s intentions change over the life course. And it depends on a load of things, including the things we’ve talked about today, including already having a child. If you have a child, your decisions might change and if you’re 42, you might go, actually, I did want two kids, but now I’m 42, I’d rather just keep the one and move on. So it’s not just for health reasons, say.

Emily: Is it a big deal if the birth rate in the UK goes down? Like, why does this matter?

Paula: Well, yes! I mean, obviously the repercussions for having these very low birth rates is of course that, we have what’s called an ageing population. So you have a dependency ratio where people who are working sort of support pension schemes for people who are not working. So if you end up with fewer people in the workforce compared to those who are relying on pensions that are generated out of the workforce, then you can see the imbalance is hugely costly. And, you know, a lot of governments are worried about these issues. You see the same in South Korea and Japan, where there’s extremely low fertility as well. But governments also quite, sort of, ambivalent about their pro-natal policies. Like, if you get into a world where you’re thinking about, well, do you tell people what to do with their fertility, with their family sizes, you know? People should have the right to their own decisions about how many kids they want, and how far apart they want them, or when they want to start. But you need to have supportive societies that support that decision making. But yes, there are costs to low fertility, or if it goes down even more.

Emily: And is that what needs to happen in order to bring the birth rate up in the UK? To have a more supportive society for people who are looking at a parenting option?

Paula: Absolutely. I mean, as I said, there is a two child norm. If you ask people how many children they want, lots of people say two kids. That in itself would mean it would sort of balance, it would be what you have, like a stable population. I feel quite strongly that we should work to remove these barriers because never mind whether governments are going to suffer from having too many people on a pension, I think that people should be able to have that right to the number of children they want.

Emily: So it’s not just that there’s a whole stream of bad guys out there who are not quite measuring up on the Tinder dates, that everyone’s heading out on [laughter].

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This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the University of Oxford. With music by John Lyons and a special thanks to Dr Paula Sheppard. Tell us what you think about this podcast – you can find us on the internet. We are @oxfordsparks and we have a website – oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk. Go check it out and tell us what you think. I’m Emily Elias. Bye for now.