07.14
The title of this post should really be “how to spin population data reports into complete meaninglessness.” I ran across this article on Yahoo a while back. Here’s how it starts:
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – More American women are choosing not to have children than three decades ago, according to a new report.
Nearly 20 percent of older women do not have children, compared to 10 percent in the 1970s, the Pew Research Center said.
The findings in the report are based on data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
So what’s the cause of this increasing childlessness?
“In recent decades, social pressure to play traditional roles has lessened in a broad variety of ways and there is more leeway for individual choice. This could play a part in lowering pressure for people to get married and bear children,” said D’Vera Cohn, a co-author of the report.
“Women have more options than in the past to build strong careers and to exercise the choice not to have children,” she added in an email.
The findings in the report are based on data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
Cohn said another reason for the increase is that children are seen by some as less important for a successful marriage. A 2007 Pew survey found that 41 percent of adults said that children are very important for a good marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990.
So, basically, this guy is saying that when women are given more “options” and greater “choice”, they naturally choose to have fewer, if any, children. He backs this up with some stats:
Education also seems to be a factor in a woman’s choice to be a mother. The more educated women are, the higher the childless rate is.
For women with a high school diploma, the rate is 17 percent, compared to 24 percent of women with a bachelor’s degree.
He then goes on to obliterate his own argument, and make everything he has said so far meaningless:
But the childlessness rate has decreased for women with advanced degrees from 31 percent in 1994 to 24 percent in 2008.
His argument went like this:
- Women are having fewer children today than they used to.
- This is because they have more choices and more options in modern society.
- But, the women at the top who have the most options and choices are choosing to have more children.
Huh?
