Gender Egalitarianism, Fertility, and an Attribution Error: a rejoinder on “The Gender Egalitarian Family Model: Empirical and Theoretical Problems”

Abstract

* The original article can be found here: Paul, Darel E. 2026: The Gender Egalitarian Family Model: Empirical and Theoretical Problems. In: Comparative Population Studies 51: 403-426. https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2026-17

This is a rejoinder to a paper published in this journal authored by Paul (2026). The paper to which this rejoinder refers takes aim at the gender egalitarian family model, and in places it makes points the field needs to absorb: the recent cross-national correlation between fertility and female labour force participation has lost some of its force; Nordic period and cohort fertility have declined in ways the framework may not have predicted; and the gendered attitudinal divergence between young men and young women is real. Yet the paper moves too readily from a critique of particular explanatory and predictive claims to a much broader rejection of the gender-egalitarian family model as a policy orientation. In doing so, it underplays an important normative and institutional strand of the literature, which has been concerned not only with demographic outcomes but also with equity and fairness as the conditions under which people can “write their own biographies.” The paper’s closing balancing act between liberal values and “the simultaneous interests of both the state and society in its own reproduction” as it is written makes me feel quite uneasy (Paul 2026: 420).