“I feel being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country. I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next, so it really keeps you focused.”
Those 43 words were uttered in 2016 by the UK’s then energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, as she tried to persuade Conservative party voters to make her their next leader instead of the childless Theresa May.
Her comments sparked a wave of outrage after they appeared in the Times newspaper one Saturday. By Monday, Leadsom had pulled out of the race.
How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?
— Republican vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance
I keep remembering this every time I read about JD Vance’s rant against vice-president Kamala Harris and other “childless cat ladies” at the top of the Democratic Party.
“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” asked Vance in a 2021 interview that resurfaced after he became Donald Trump’s running mate.
His comments have prompted an even bigger surge of fury and, happily for the Democrats, Vance cannot vanish as easily as Leadsom did because, apart from anything else, it would make Trump look foolish for picking him.
I say “happily” because Vance’s comments are not just astronomically offensive and politically witless, they also betray a serious misunderstanding of where the world is heading in the first half of the 21st century.
It’s well known that birth rates have plummeted in the US and other rich economies across the world. But a number of researchers say one of the chief drivers of this trend is that women are not merely having fewer children, they are increasingly having none at all.
Some experts think childlessness has fuelled most of the drop in fertility in the US over the last couple of decades. The share of American women aged between 35 and 44 who have never had a child rose from 16 per cent in 2012 to 20 per cent in 2022, one recent bit of analysis shows.
Women are only part of the story.
The share of childless Americans under 50, men and women, who say they are unlikely ever to have children rose to 47 per cent in 2023, a 10 percentage point jump from 2018, a recent Pew study shows.
The reason? Most say they simply don’t want to.
The trend is similar elsewhere. Around a third of childless older millennials in the UK say they definitely won’t have a child, while another 20 per cent say they probably won’t.
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All this has interesting implications for the working world where those of us in the cat lady category have long been wildly outnumbered.
Consider the always fraught matter of deciding who gets to take holidays when in a team. Speaking from personal experience, if you are the only childless employee in a team, it takes a certain level of temerity to insist on taking leave in school holidays if it means a parent of school-aged children has to keep coming into the office. I imagine resistance will be easier once the ranks of the childless grow.
In some jobs, of course, being able to take vacation outside school break times is a perk. Flights and hotels can be cheaper. Roads and beaches are emptier.
About a third of the childless Americans surveyed by Pew said they had been expected to take on extra work or responsibilities
Sadly this does not work so well if you need to be on deck for important events or projects that are often arranged to avoid peak family holiday periods. The rise of child-free workers may well change that scheduling and also the amount of work assigned.
About a third of the childless Americans surveyed by Pew said they had been expected to take on extra work or responsibilities. A similar proportion said they were given less flexibility than parents.
Again, you can imagine this sort of thing changing as the workplace fills with more non-parents.
Still, it’s swings and roundabouts. Just over a third of those surveyed agreed that not having children made it easier for them to network outside office hours. And 17 per cent said they had been given more opportunities for important assignments.
Ultimately, what matters is a demographic shift is under way. The number of non-reproducers is already large and it is rising. And unfortunately for JD Vance, these people may not have children but they have votes. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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