Smart Women Don’t Have Babies

OK, the headline is a bit exaggerated, but
research being published by London School of Economics political
scientist Satoshi Kanazawa in the November 2014 issue of Social
Science Research finds in general that
the higher a woman’s IQ, the lower is her fertility. Here’s the
abstract:

Demographers debate why people have children in advanced
industrial societies where children are net economic costs. From an
evolutionary perspective, however, the important question is why
some individuals choose not to have children. Recent theoretical
developments in evolutionary psychology suggest that more
intelligent individuals may be more likely to prefer to remain
childless than less intelligent individuals. Analyses of the
National Child Development Study show that more intelligent men and
women express preference to remain childless early in their
reproductive careers, but only more intelligent women (not more
intelligent men) are more likely to remain childless by the end of
their reproductive careers. Controlling for education and earnings
does not at all attenuate the association between childhood general
intelligence and lifetime childlessness among women.
One-standard-deviation increase in childhood general intelligence
(15 IQ points) decreases women’s odds of parenthood by 21–25%.
Because women have a greater impact on the average intelligence of
future generations, the dysgenic fertility among women is predicted
to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population
in advanced industrial nations.

This research prompts me to speculate that the Flynn Effect
which finds that average
IQs have been rising around the world during the past century
likely explains a good bit of the continuing global fall in total
fertility rates.

If you’d like to enjoy the column that prompted the most hate
email I have gotten so far, see: “Why
Are People Having Fewer Kids?: Perhaps It’s Because They Don’t Like
Them Very Much.”

Disclosure: My wife and I are childless. And yes,
notwithstanding the fact that she married me, she is very, very
smart. And as I have earlier disclosed: My wife and I try not to
flaunt our voluntarily childless lifestyle too much.