The Short Read
- Fertility decline in developing countries cannot be explained by one simple reason.
- A new research paper by Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen of Tokyo International University studied 115 developing countries between 1991 and 2018.
- The study found that women’s labour market participation appears to reduce fertility significantly in North and South America.
- But the same effect was not statistically robust in Africa, Asia/Pacific or developing Europe.
- This means women’s work matters, but it does not affect fertility in the same way everywhere.
- In India, fertility has already fallen below replacement level. The 2024 Sample Registration System report put India’s Total Fertility Rate at 1.9, with rural fertility at 2.1 and urban fertility at 1.5.
- The real issue is not whether women should work or have children. The issue is whether societies make it possible for women to do both without punishment.
Women’s work and fertility: The new question nobody can ignore
There was a time when fertility decline was discussed in a very different language. Population control. Family planning. Small family norms. Two-child messaging. Contraception. Education. Health access.
Now another word has entered the conversation. “Work.”
Not because women suddenly stopped wanting children the moment they began working. Life is rarely that simple. But because the modern woman’s day has changed faster than the systems around her.
She studies longer. Marries later. Works for more years. Moves cities. Pays rent. Supports parents. Handles deadlines. Builds a career. Travels for work. Manages fertility anxiety. Hears family questions at every wedding. Watches childcare costs rise. Calculates maternity leave against appraisals. Wonders if one child is manageable. Wonders if a second child is impossible.
Then the world looks at falling fertility and asks: Why are women having fewer children?
The better question is: What kind of life are we asking women to build children into?
That is where the debate on women’s employment and fertility becomes important.
A new research paper by Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen of Tokyo International University examines whether women’s participation in the labour market affects fertility across 115 developing countries between 1991 and 2018. The headline finding is fascinating because it refuses to be neat.
Women’s employment appears to reduce fertility significantly in North and South America. But in Africa, Asia/Pacific, and developing Europe, the evidence is not statistically robust once other factors are taken into account.
In plain English: work matters, but work is not the only story.
Why the Americas stand out
The study found the strongest link between women’s labour participation and lower fertility in North and South America. That makes intuitive sense.
When women enter paid work in societies where childcare is expensive, parental leave is weak, men do not share care equally, and workplaces penalise motherhood, children become a more difficult decision. A woman may not reject motherhood. She may postpone it. She may have one child instead of two. A woman may stay childfree because the cost of having children is not only financial. It is professional.
- A pregnancy can change how a manager sees her.
- A maternity break can slow promotion.
- A child’s illness can disrupt meetings.
- Breastfeeding can collide with travel.
- A second child can make a woman look “less available”.
- A career that took years to build can suddenly be treated as fragile.
So the choice is not between career and cradle, in a romantic sense. It is career, cradle, money, time, sleep, health, marriage, commute, family support and employer behaviour all arriving in one impossible spreadsheet.
That is why family-supportive work design matters.
- If the workplace is structured as if every worker has someone else at home to handle care, women pay the price.
- If childcare is unaffordable, mothers pay the price.
- If fathers are not expected to take equal leave, mothers pay the price.
- If flexible work damages career growth, mothers pay the price.
Fertility decline then becomes not only a demographic outcome. It becomes feedback from women’s lives.
Why Asia is more complicated
The Asia/Pacific finding is especially interesting for India.
The study did not find a statistically robust effect of women’s labour participation alone on fertility in Asia/Pacific. That does not mean women’s work has no relationship with fertility. It means the relationship may be shaped more strongly by other forces.
Family structure. Education. Marriage age. Urbanisation. Household authority. Son preference. Housing costs. Migration. Informal work. Access to reproductive healthcare. In-laws. Caregiving expectations. Social permission to work after marriage or childbirth.
In many Indian homes, fertility decisions are not made by one woman alone. They are shaped by husbands, parents, in-laws, doctors, family finances, caste, community norms, housing, safety, job type, and the amount of help available after childbirth.
- A woman may be working, but that does not mean she has full control over when to have a child.
- A woman may want a second child, but cannot imagine surviving the cost, the career penalty, the lack of childcare, and the exhaustion.
- A woman may want to work after childbirth, but her job may not allow flexibility.
- A woman may not be in paid formal work at all, but may be doing unpaid household labour, farm work, family business work, care work or a home-based enterprise that never shows up properly in labour data.
That is why the developing-world fertility story cannot be reduced to working women choosing careers over children. In India, the real story sits inside households.
India’s fertility shift is already here
India is not waiting for a future fertility debate. It is already inside one.
The 2024 Sample Registration System report put India’s Total Fertility Rate at 1.9, below the replacement level of 2.1. Rural fertility stood at 2.1, while urban fertility stood at 1.5.
Decoding that urban number
Urban women often face the sharpest version of the work-family conflict. Longer education. Later marriage. Higher rent. Nuclear homes. Long commutes. Demanding jobs. Fewer grandparents living nearby. Higher childcare costs. Greater pressure to maintain a two-income household. More anxiety about school fees, healthcare and housing.
A woman may want a child and still ask, “Who will help?” Most people ridicule it, calling it emotional drama. But in reality, it is economic planning.
At the same time, India’s female labour force participation has been rising in recent years. Still, women’s work remains uneven. Much of it is informal, underpaid, unpaid or vulnerable. Many women leave work after marriage or childbirth. A lot of them return through part-time, home-based or freelance routes. Many continue working without recognition because their labour is folded into family duty.
So India is facing two conversations at once.
- How do we bring more women into paid, meaningful work?
- How do we make family life compatible with women’s work?
Ignoring either question will create bad policy.
Fertility decline is not automatically a crisis
A lower fertility rate is not automatically bad.
It can reflect better education, improved healthcare, lower infant mortality, access to contraception, delayed marriage, more women’s autonomy, and better survival outcomes for children.
For decades, many developing countries worked towards smaller, healthier families. Fertility decline can be a sign of progress. The concern begins when fertility falls because people feel they cannot afford, manage or survive the life they want.
Understanding that difference can clarify a lot.
- A woman choosing to have one child because that is what she wants is ‘autonomy.’
- A woman having one child because she knows a second will end her career is a ‘constraint.’
- A couple delaying children because they are not ready is a ‘choice.’
- A couple delaying because rent, childcare, job insecurity and lack of support make parenthood impossible is a ‘pressure.’
- A woman staying childfree because she wants that life is ‘freedom’.
- A woman staying childfree because work punishes mothers is a ‘warning.’
That is why policymakers must be careful. Fertility policy should never become a pressure on women to reproduce for the nation. Women are not demographic instruments. The goal should be choice. Real choice.
The kind supported by healthcare, childcare, safe jobs, fair wages, shared care, and workplaces that do not treat pregnancy or parenting as a career defect.
The workplace is now part of fertility policy
For years, we have been treating fertility as a health or family planning issue. The new evidence shows that workplaces belong in the conversation too.
- A company may never talk about fertility. But it shapes fertility decisions every day.
- It shapes them when maternity leave is treated like an inconvenience.
- It shapes them when women returning after childbirth are given smaller roles.
- It shapes them when men are praised for being fathers, but women are quietly judged for being mothers.
- It shapes them when childcare support is absent.
- It shapes them when long hours are treated as loyalty.
- It shapes them when remote work is available, but career growth goes only to those who are always visible.
- It shapes them when pregnancy loss is not supported.
- It shapes them when women and illness are treated as personal disruptions instead of workplace realities.
In a society where career continuity matters for women’s income and identity, workplaces cannot pretend reproductive decisions are made outside office walls. They are made in the shadow of office walls.
What businesses must learn
Businesses do not need to become fertility campaigners. That would be uncomfortable and inappropriate. They need to become family-compatible employers.
There is a difference.
A family-compatible workplace does not ask women when they plan to have children. It does not romanticise motherhood in public and punish it in promotion rooms. At the same time, it does not assume caregiving belongs to women alone. Also, it does not build leadership pathways only for people with no interruptions.
Instead, the workplace designs better systems. Such as:
- Paid parental leave.
- Return-to-work support.
- No penalty for maternity.
- Paternity leave that men actually use.
- Childcare support or childcare partnerships.
- Flexible work that does not damage promotion prospects.
- Manager training.
- Safe transport.
- Health benefits, including reproductive and mental health.
- Support after pregnancy loss.
- Career paths for women returning after breaks.
- Workload design that does not assume endless availability.
Let us not call these ‘soft benefits.’ They are workforce planning. If companies want women to work, lead and stay, they must make life around work possible.
What governments must understand
Governments in developing countries often treat fertility decline with alarm after spending decades encouraging smaller families. That panic can lead to bad choices.
The answer is not to tell women to have more children. Instead, the answer is to make motherhood less punitive and child-rearing less unsupported. That means:
- Affordable childcare.
- Better public health systems.
- Safe public transport.
- Quality schools.
- Protection from pregnancy discrimination.
- Stronger labour protections for informal women workers.
- Social security for women outside formal jobs.
- Support for working mothers in rural and urban settings.
- Recognition of unpaid care work.
- Reproductive healthcare that gives women real control.
- Better data on informal work, household decision-making and care burdens.
The study itself points to the need for more context-specific policy.
- What works in Latin America may not work in Asia.
- What works in urban India may not work in rural India.
- What works for salaried women may not work for women in informal work.
Fertility decline in developing countries is not one story. It is many stories, shaped by many systems.
What women already know
Many women do not need a research paper to understand this tension. They have been living it. And they know what it means:
- To calculate ovulation around travel.
- To plan pregnancy around appraisal cycles.
- To wonder whether telling HR will change how a manager behaves.
- To return from maternity leave and find the team has moved on.
- To hear, “You already have one child, why do you want more pressure?”
- To hear, “You have no children, so you can stay late.”
- To choose a job because it is closer to home, not because it is better.
- To reduce ambition because the system makes ambition too expensive.
- To be asked about motherhood in interviews without anyone asking men about fatherhood.
The conversation around women’s employment and fertility becomes powerful when it stops treating women as statistics and starts listening to the trade-offs behind the numbers.
The real lesson
The new study is useful because it challenges lazy thinking.
It does not say that women working automatically causes fertility decline everywhere. Also, it does not say women should work less. It does not say fertility must rise at the cost of women’s freedom. Instead, it says the relationship between work and fertility depends on the world around women. That world can either support choice or punish it.
- If women have income but no childcare, the choice narrows.
- If women have an education but no safe jobs, the choices narrow.
- If women have jobs but no maternity protection, the choice narrows.
- If women have children but no career continuity, the choice narrows.
- If women have reproductive rights but no family support, the choice narrows.
A society that wants both women’s work and stable family formation must stop treating care as a private female problem. That is the heart of the story.
Women’s work and fertility: The closing thought
Careers are not replacing cradles. Unsupported careers are making cradles harder to imagine. That’s the difference.
Women are not refusing family life because they entered the workforce. Many are asking whether family life, as currently designed, is compatible with the lives they are trying to build. That question deserves respect.
The future should not force women to choose between income and intimacy, leadership and motherhood, ambition and care, freedom and family. The better future is one where women can work, rest, love, parent, choose, pause, return and grow.
Fertility decline in developing countries should not become a reason to control women’s choices. Instead, it should become a reason to redesign the systems around them.
Editorial note & Sources
This DEI Insights article is based on Devdiscourse’s summary of a new paper by Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen of Tokyo International University. The study examines 115 developing countries between 1991 and 2018 and finds that female labour participation is significantly associated with lower fertility in North and South America, but not robustly so in Africa, Asia/Pacific or developing Europe.
The paper’s arXiv abstract states that it divides 115 developing countries into four regional groups and uses panel data methods to study the causal effect of women’s labour force participation on total fertility rates. Its conclusion notes that women’s career choices appear to influence fertility behaviour in North/South America, while other factors may matter more in other regions.
The Indian context uses the 2024 Sample Registration System fertility figures, which put India’s Total Fertility Rate at 1.9, with rural fertility at 2.1 and urban fertility at 1.5.
