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Germany is facing one of its greatest social and economic challenges: demographic change. The Birth rate has been well below the reproduction rate for decades. In Germany it is currently 1.35 children per woman – too little to keep the population stable. For comparison: around 2.1 children would be necessary for a constant population size.
What initially appears to be a question of individual life choices is actually a symptom of deep structural and cultural change. It’s about values, opportunities – and about equality.
The American Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin has in hers recent work showed that the decline in birth rates is less due to economic insecurities than to a mismatch between the life plans of women and men. Today, women are better educated than men – in Germany they represented 2024 over 53 percent of university graduates – have higher professional ambitions and economic independence like never before. But social structures, labor markets and role expectations have only partially adapted to this reality.
Goldin calls this the “Grand Gender Convergence Gap” – the large gap between what women want and the opportunities that are actually available to them. Women want both: professional success and Family. But they come across working models that are still based on the old logic of the male sole breadwinner. Men, on the other hand, are often hesitant to adapt their ideas about life. The result: frustration, starting a family later – and fewer children.
This mismatch is not an individual failure, but a social failure. When gender values drift apart, the fragile balance between the job market, family and life goals becomes unstable. Women then decide not against having children, but rather against structures that deny them fair conditions.
Standstill in equality
A current one Investigation by DIW Berlin shows that the progress of the last few decades has stalled. The Gender pay gap is still 16 percent in Germany, one of the highest values in Europe. Only 29 percent of Leadership positions in the economy are occupied by women. And work after the birth of a child 66 percent of mothers work part-time – for fathers it is just 7 percent.
This leads to significant losses over the course of their working lives: women in Germany receive 27 percent less retirement income. The much-cited part-time trap remains – and it is also an overall economic problem. Complete equalization of labor force participation would reduce German gross domestic product in the long term up to 10 percent increase.
Equality is not a luxury, but an economic necessity. If the birth rate remains low and at the same time women are underrepresented in the labor market, the working population will shrink in two ways: demographically and structurally.
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