With China’s fertility rate having fallen off a cliff, many experts have offered a variety of advice for addressing the problem.
But all of the proposals lack an essential component: a critical perspective on the role of gender.
Because the focus has been on the impact of high childrearing costs on fertility, the career penalty that women incur when they have a child has largely been overlooked. China’s policymakers would benefit greatly from the work of the Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize for economics this year for her research advancing “our understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.”