The Fertility Tightrope: Walking the Line Between Growth and Decline
- Ishwa Nawaz
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
“You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time.
You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.”
America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie (2023) may have been written for cinema, but it
reads like an economic parable. Across the developed world, falling birth rates are one of the most urgent demographic challenges of the 21st century - and the contradiction Ferrera
describes, to be a perfect worker and a perfect parent, lies at the heart of the problem. Women are asked to walk a tightrope- one misstep, and they risk falling either professionally or personally. That balancing act exposes deep flaws in classical economic thinking about
labour, incentives and growth - and shows why a feminist economic lens is urgently needed.
Classical growth models, like Solow’s, assume labour is an abstract, inexhaustible input. But
people are not infinite or interchangeable. Falling fertility reveals the fragility of this
assumption- shrinking cohorts of workers not only dampen growth prospects but also
destabilise the fiscal foundations on which welfare and pension systems rest. The tightrope
walk of women’s choices- whether, when and how to have children- becomes a balancing act
with consequences for entire economies.
Take the UK. In 2023, fertility was just 1.5 children per woman (ONS), far below the
replacement rate of 2.1. At the same time, the old-age dependency ratio is rising: fewer
workers supporting a growing number of retirees. Overlapping Generations (OLG) capture
this starkly. In theory, today’s workers fund pensions for today’s retirees, expecting the next
generation to do the same. But when each cohort is smaller than the last, the arithmetic
collapses. Taxes rise. Benefits shrink. Debt mounts. The numbers expose a structural fault
line. How long can an economy grow if the next generation is shrinking? Families juggle
work, care, and survival on a rope that keeps getting thinner and thinner. Imagine stepping
onto it tomorrow- career on one side, parenthood on the other. One misstep… and you fall.
So is this really about personal preference? Hardly. When housing is unaffordable, childcare
scarce or prohibitively expensive, and employment insecure, family formation is constrained,
not chosen. Economist Emma Holten argues in Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can
Change Our World (2025) that ignoring unpaid care work - still overwhelmingly performed
by women- distorts both policy and theory. It weakens support systems, limits women’s
participation in the labour market, and renders domestic labour invisible in GDP. This isn’t
just an academic oversight: it is a political and economic blind spot with enormous costs. If
the economy punishes parenthood, can we really call having children a free choice?
Quick fixes exist, of course. Greece, for example, introduced a €2,000 per-child payment in
2024. Headlines followed, but structural insecurities remained. Rational choice theory makes
the logic brutally clear: families weigh costs and benefits- and today, the costs are steep. Paid parental leave is limited. Flexible work is rare. Career penalties for mothers are severe - so severe that anticipation of the “motherhood penalty” alone can delay or prevent childbirth (Ichino & Olsson, 2019). Predictably, rational actors respond by having fewer children.
But low fertility is not inevitable. Scandinavia shows that the rope can be widened. Generous
parental leave, high-quality subsidised childcare, and gender equal norms stabilise fertility.
Fluchtmann (2023) finds that these policies reinforce Claudia Goldin’s (2023) observation:
when men share housework and childcare, fertility rates rise. Sweden, at 1.8 children per
woman, outperforms the UK, Greece and South Korea. The lesson is clear: a steadier
tightrope and safety nets help families navigate the balancing act.
The Solow model would suggest that if labour stagnates, growth must come from more
capital or higher productivity. But that misses the point. Why not treat social infrastructure as
equally vital forms of investment? We treat roads and bridges as investments in growth - why
not babies? Childcare and family support are essential for sustaining the workforce. A
feminist economic lens reframes the debate, suggesting growth is not only about GDP, but
about designing economies where reproduction and care are central to sustainability.
Ultimately, the fertility crisis is not cultural drift but an economic design problem.
Parenthood has become a high-wire act with no safety net. The question - economic as well as social - is whether we will build the nets beneath the tightrope, or simply watch it sway.
Ishwa Nawaz is a student at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, and one of the two Young Economist of the Year 2025 winners.
Bibliography:
BBC News (2024). Greece pays women to have children.
Jonas Fluchtmann, Violetta Van Veen, Willem Adema. 2023. “Fertility, Employment and
Family Policy.” OECD Social Employment and Migration Working Papers, September.
Dr Claudia Goldin. 2025. “The Downside of Fertility.”
Holten, Emma. 2025. Deficit. Random House.
Office for National Statistics (2023). Living Longer: Implications of an Ageing Population.
Andrea Ichino and Martin Olsson (2019) Can economic incentives promote a more equal
gender division of house chores?
