Gender equality and fertility

Agnese Vitali, Università Bocconi
Arnstein Aassve, Università Bocconi
Trude Lappegård, Statistics Norway

In this paper we test to what extent gender equality leads to a change, and in particular an increase, in fertility. We explore a hypothesis that as we move towards more gender egalitarian societies gender equality might become a pre-requisite for increased fertility. We focus on Norway, a country that score high on gender equality indexes, and have relatively high fertility. We make use of data from 430 municipalities, during 2000-2008, including information about fertility levels and a rather detailed description of gender equality. We start by running a very simple regression to document the correlation between the gender equality index and fertility rates. As the index is problematic for interpretation we use the components from the index at a detailed level to tell us more about the mechanism underlying it.