Postindustrial Fertility Ideals, Intentions, and Gender Inequality: A Comparative Qualitative Analysis

We are grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation (grant no. SES1123885) to Mary Brinton for the Japanese, Spanish, and U. S. portions of the project and from the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for additional support of the Japan portion of the project. We also appreciate the financial support from the Agency for Administration of University and Research Grants (grant # 2013-BP-A-00043) and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 657030 to Xiana Bueno for the Spanish portion of the project, and the financial support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond/Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (grant no. P11-1049: 1) to Livia Oláh for the Swedish portion. An earlier draft of the paper benefited from the constructive comments of Eunsil Oh, Yun Zhou, and an anonymous reviewer. ideals remain centered on two children in most postindustrial societies, presenting a puzzle for demographers interested in very low fertility. This paper explores the conditions producing a gap between fertility ideals and intentions among young highly-educated adults in different postindustrial contexts. We employ in-depth interviews to analyze reasoning about fertility ideals and intentions in two countries with very low fertility (Japan and Spain) and two with slightly higher fertility (the U. S. and Sweden). We find that American and Swedish female interviewees are more likely than those in Japan and Spain to cite work-family conflict as a reason for their ideals-intentions gap. Our results also suggest that gender inequality is more important in generating low fertility intentions among highly-educated interviewees in Japan than Spain. Taken together, these findings suggest complexities in how gender inequality affects fertility intentions among the highly-educated in postindustrial contexts.