Letizia Mencarini

Volume 55 - Article 22 | Pages 679–716

Fertility rates are declining across much of the globe, yet the forces driving this decline have become increasingly complex, and classic theories have become less adequate to explain recent trends. While economic and gender-related explanations have long dominated fertility research, emerging global uncertainties, such as climate change, democratic backsliding, economic crises, and regional conflicts, may also shape how individuals evaluate childbearing. In addition to the more classical factors, this cross-national study examines how macrolevel uncertainties influence perceptions of fertility intentions in Italy, Argentina, the United States, and Germany. These countries offer distinct fertility trajectories and face unique combinations of sociopolitical and environmental challenges. Using a conjoint experiment, we examine how individuals evaluate, across hypothetical scenarios, their intention of having a child under varying household, policy, and macrolevel conditions. Across all four countries, material security remains central: household income is the strongest predictor of fertility intentions, with homeownership and childcare playing smaller roles. At the same time, perceptions of macrolevel stability, including expectations about climate conditions, economic prospects, democratic functioning, and peace, exert substantial and meaningful effects, comparable to homeownership and childcare provision but more pronounced than those associated with gender-role arrangements. Cross-country differences show that macroeconomic stability and climate change are most consequential in Argentina, while in the United States respondents are less responsive to geopolitical conflict. These findings show that individuals evaluate childbearing not only through their immediate circumstances, but also through expectations about broader societal futures, highlighting the importance of incorporating macrolevel uncertainty when explaining contemporary fertility decline.

This study explores what constitutes an ideal family in Italy and Spain, questioning the prevailing view that they are homogenous and traditional family-oriented countries. Specifically, it investigates whether family ideals in Italy and Spain can be characterized as ‘traditional’ (i); whether family ideals are similar in the two counties (ii); and whether these ideals vary across gender and educational backgrounds (iii). To capture the multidimensional nature of family ideals, we employed a factorial survey experiment in which respondents evaluated a set of family scenarios. This approach enables an assessment of the relative importance of the factors shaping individuals’ perceptions of the ideal family. The findings unveil a significantly modern picture of family ideals, where good communication and gender equality play a key role in positive family evaluations. However, cross-country comparisons reveal a greater prevalence of postmodern family ideals in Spain than in Italy, with a few, but notable differences across gender and education.

The Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) is a research infrastructure that generates harmonised, high-quality, and timely data on families and individual life-course trajectories. Its flagship instrument—the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS)—provides comparable evidence on demographic behaviour, intergenerational relationships, and the evolving social roles of women and men, thereby enabling scholars and policy-makers to address pressing societal challenges. Currently, a second round of comparative data collection is ongoing and will deliver fresh insights into persistent low fertility, the increasingly complex transition to adulthood, and new forms of family solidarity. In Italy, Wave 1 of the second round started in summer 2025, supported by the PNRR projects “Fostering Open Science in Social Science Research” (FOSSR) and “Aging Well in an Aging Society” (Age-It).

In Italy, the unequal distribution of household chores persists, disproportionately affecting women and potentially discouraging fertility intentions. This study explores the relationship between women’s domestic burden and reproductive intentions, and how this relationship varies between men and women, depending on the parity achieved and the sex of the child (or children) they already had. The paper relies on data from 2016 ISTAT Survey on Families and Social Subjects. The results find this association only for women (and not for men), and particularly for those working and residing in the Centre-North. Interestingly, unlike previous findings, as the childless women’s domestic burden grows, it correlates negatively with their intention to enter motherhood. For mothers, the correlation is somewhat reversed: notably, among mothers with one child, there’s a discernible trend where fertility intentions positively align with increasing household burdens, driven by mothers of one daughter. This suggests a potential preference among traditional mothers of a daughter for having another child, while the more egalitarian, i.e., less burdened ones, seem content with the current family size after having a daughter.

The study makes use of the 2016 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family, Social Subjects, and Life Cycle to demonstrate that family‐related behavior is now rapidly changing in Italy. The country is often taken as a stronghold of traditionalism. We, instead, highlight recent and substantial changes in cohabitation, dissolution, and nonmarital fertility in the country. In doing so, we carefully assess the predictions made by the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) and show that trends in Italy are monotonically moving in the direction of the SDT. There are, though, important differences across educational groups and regions, that is, family‐related behavior is also changing in the South of Italy in much the same way but not at the same speed as in the rest of the country.

Women’s labor force participation has increased in Western countries, but gender gaps remain, especially among parents. Using a novel comparative perspective, we assess women’s and men’s employment trajectories from midlife onward by parity and education. We provide insights into the gendered parenthood-employment gaps examining the long-term implications of parenthood beyond the core childbearing ages by decomposing years lived between ages 40–74, in years of employment, joblessness, and retirement. Using multistate incidence-based life tables, we compare different cultural and institutional contexts: Finland, Italy, and the USA. Our results document large cross-national variation, with education playing a key role. In Finland, the number of years of employment increases with parity for women and men, and the gender gap is small; in the USA, the relationship between parity and years of employment is relatively flat, although a gender gap emerges among those with two or more children; in Italy, the number of years of employment decreases sharply for women as parity increases, while it increases for men. Notably, education has a similar positive impact on years of employment across all groups in Finland. In contrast, in the USA and Italy, the gender gap is only half as large among highly educated mothers as it is among low educated mothers. The employment trajectories of childless women and men differ greatly across countries.