Job Uncertainty Lowers Men's Fertility Intentions In Sweden
Men unsure about recovery wanted children at 44%, dropping 17 percentage points below confident men. Men who simply rated their prospects as poor showed no such decline.
Swedish men who can’t assess whether they’d recover from job loss aren’t planning for children. This inability to form expectations, distinct from fearing unemployment itself, offers new insight into why fertility keeps dropping even as economies grow.
The research: Oskar Lindström of Stockholm University (now at University of Florence) analyzed survey data from 681 childless Swedish couples collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 (Uncertainty, resilience, and fertility: Perceived capacity to overcome loss of employment and fertility intentions in Sweden, 2021).
Why it matters: Sweden’s fertility rate dropped to 1.45 children per woman in 2023, the lowest ever recorded. Unemployment rates, GDP, and standard economic indicators don’t explain the decline. People’s perceptions of their economic futures have changed in ways demographers are still mapping.
The Pattern in the Data
Among childless Swedish couples, 61% wanted a child within three years. Three-quarters said they could recover from job loss. But 15.6% couldn’t assess their recovery chances at all. Job security felt solid to 82%, yet this confidence mattered less than believing in the possibility of rebuilding a career.
Men unsure about recovery wanted children at 44%, dropping 17 percentage points below confident men. Men who simply rated their prospects as poor showed no such decline. Women wanted children at 63% to 64% across all recovery assessments. Uncertainty depressed fertility. Pessimism did not.
Certain groups bore heavier effects. Foreign-born individuals unsure about recovery: 35% wanted children versus 62% among confident foreign-born. Native-born individuals hovered near 60% regardless of recovery confidence. Low income paired with poor recovery prospects: 36% versus 69% for low-income individuals confident in recovery. Middle income with uncertainty: 50% versus 67% with confidence. Risk-averse individuals facing uncertainty: 51% versus 66% when confident about recovery.
Sweden’s rate hit 1.45 in 2023. Finland dropped to 1.26, Norway to 1.40. The entire Nordic region, long known for stable fertility, now faces decline concentrated in first births among childless couples. The sharpest drops appear among people with tenuous labor market positions.
The survey included 681 people aged 20 to 40, half male, most native-born. Small subgroups create uncertainty in some findings: 59 reported poor recovery prospects, 104 couldn’t assess them, only 7 combined poor prospects with job insecurity. The response rate reached 27%.
The data point to a specific mechanism. Not knowing whether you could rebuild your career matters more than expecting you couldn’t.
Risk You Can Calculate Versus Futures You Can’t Picture
Risk involves probabilities. You estimate 30% odds of losing your job, save six months of expenses, develop a plan. You tell yourself: “If X happens, I’ll do Y.”
Genuine uncertainty eliminates calculation, after all you can’t estimate the probability of finding any work, let alone the same work, because you lack the framework to make the estimate. Your decision-making is going to stall, especially without hypothetical futures, you can’t orient action toward any of them.
The Narrative Framework in fertility research argues people base fertility decisions on imagined futures rather than current conditions. Economic volatility doesn’t just alter those imaginaries. It blocks their formation. Childbearing always carries uncertainty, an irreversible choice with consequences playing out over decades. People act by building narratives. When you can’t visualize surviving an employment shock, you can’t visualize a future stable enough for raising children.
Men rating their recovery prospects as “low” reached a pessimistic calculation but still formed intentions at normal rates. Men selecting “unsure” signaled inability to assess the question and showed far lower intentions. Pessimistic expectations differed fundamentally from absent expectations.
Why Globalization Changed the Question
High-income countries saw fertility decline after the Great Recession in patterns too uniform across contexts to reflect local factors alone. The declines persisted through economic recovery. Recession, unemployment, wage stagnation don’t match the timeline. Studies examining job insecurity produced mixed results, especially in countries with robust safety nets.
In 2003, sociologists Melinda Mills and Hans-Peter Blossfeld described how globalization creates structural uncertainty. International markets expose local employment to distant shocks. Intensified competition demands constant skill updates. Technology expands networks but also accelerates change. Volatile markets become inescapable. These forces make the future harder to predict regardless of current employment statistics.
Losing a job in this environment might mean your skills became obsolete, your industry relocated overseas, your profession contracted or disappeared. The question isn’t whether you’ll find work. It’s whether you can rebuild your career, maintain your professional identity, preserve your earning trajectory. Sweden cushions unemployment through generous benefits (which itself has been cut and chipped slowly away since the Great Recession) but can’t guarantee career continuity. The safety net catches falls (for now) but doesn’t restore positions.
This represents structural uncertainty built into contemporary economic systems rather than cyclical uncertainty tied to downturns. How we conceptualize economic security (preventing job loss) mismatches how people experience it (adapting to continuous change).
Which Groups Face the Strongest Effects
Foreign-born individuals showed the starkest patterns. When unable to assess recovery prospects, only 35% wanted children, down 25 percentage points from confident foreign-born individuals. Migration already requires navigating unfamiliar credential systems, professional networks, and workplace norms. Layering genuine economic uncertainty on top makes stable futures nearly impossible to construct. Sweden offers integration support through language instruction and job placement services. If immigrants can’t assess whether they could recover from employment disruption due to credential recognition barriers, discrimination, or unfamiliarity with labor market dynamics, that support doesn’t translate into family formation.
Middle-income households including teachers, nurses, and mid-level managers showed 50% fertility intentions when uncertain about recovery versus 67% when confident. They’ve accumulated enough to lose but lack sufficient cushion to feel secure in losing it.
Low-income individuals responded differently. The degree of resilience, not uncertainty about it, drove their fertility intentions. Poor recovery prospects combined with low income: 36% wanted children versus 69% among low-income individuals confident about recovery. Economic vulnerability makes even clear perception of inability to recover enough to deter childbearing. Seven individuals combined poor recovery prospects with job insecurity. They showed 24% fertility intentions, 40 percentage points below those secure on both measures. The number is tiny but marks the boundary where family formation becomes nearly unthinkable.
Risk-averse individuals showed a 15 percentage point gap (51% versus 66%) between uncertain and confident groups. Risk-takers showed no pattern. Risk-averse people struggle most when risk calculation becomes impossible. They aim to minimize bad outcomes, but genuine uncertainty prevents identifying what those outcomes might be or estimating their likelihood. Risk attitudes don’t simply correlate with both employment prospects and fertility preferences. They moderate whether economic uncertainty paralyzes fertility decisions.
Job Security Versus Recovery Capacity
The study separated perceived job security (will I lose my job within twelve months?) from perceived recovery capacity (could I rebuild my career?). Job security showed weaker, less consistent links to fertility intentions. People expecting job loss had lower intentions, but the associations often fell short of statistical significance. Being “unsure” about job security showed no consistent negative pattern. Being “unsure” about recovery capacity did.
Job security measures immediate threat. Recovery capacity measures adaptive capability. Immediate threats might trigger short-term postponement. Inability to imagine rebuilding blocks long-term planning entirely.
Some 82% of respondents felt secure in their jobs versus 75% confident in recovery ability. The survey ran during COVID-19, when employment uncertainty typically spikes. Swedes felt less confident they could bounce back than they felt about keeping their jobs in the first place. That gap between current security and future adaptability may locate where fertility decline actually happens.
The Gender Split
Women showed no link between recovery confidence and fertility intentions. Their likelihood of wanting children held steady at 63% to 64% across all recovery assessments. Men’s intentions varied sharply by recovery confidence. This split aligns with persistent gender norms around economic provision. Men apparently internalize expectations of ensuring economic stability before fatherhood, even in Sweden where gender equality ranks high by international measures.
Several explanations remain untested. Women might assess economic security at the couple level, making their individual employment resilience less relevant to fertility decisions. Women might face different employment uncertainties centered on career penalties from motherhood rather than recovery from job loss. This measure wouldn’t capture that dimension. The study lacked complete data on partner characteristics, but fertility decisions emerge from couple dynamics. One partner’s uncertainty might be offset by the other’s confidence or amplified when both face uncertainty.
What Policy Currently Misses
If genuine uncertainty inhibits fertility more than calculable risk, current interventions may address the wrong problem. Most policies target what happens if you lose a job or working a job unable to cover cost of living: unemployment insurance, housing benefits, healthcare subsidies, etc. These buffer against known risks but don’t address unpredictability.
Sweden invests heavily in active labor market policies including job search assistance, retraining, and subsidized employment. Fertility keeps declining. The issue may not be support availability but assurance and underwriting that available support would preserve professional standing and earning potential. Finding a job differs from maintaining a career trajectory.
A communication gap might exist. If Sweden’s labor market is more forgiving than people believe, the problem involves information and expectations rather than material conditions. Workers may also be reading their environment accurately. In globalized labor markets, specific skills do become obsolete quickly. Professional identities do prove fragile. The perception might match reality.
Unanswered Questions
How does recovery uncertainty connect to fertility intentions mechanically? Does uncertainty prevent forming any fertility desires, or does it prevent acting on existing desires? Does it make childbearing seem impossible or merely inadvisable temporarily? The 2012 GGS wave found only 45% of Swedish women with positive intentions actually had a child within three years (3% of those with negative intentions did). Does recovery uncertainty produce delayed births or forgone births?
We don’t know how perceptions align with actual labor market outcomes. Do people reporting uncertainty about finding equivalent work face worse reemployment prospects in practice? If perceptions diverge from reality, interventions might target expectations. If perceptions match reality, interventions must address material conditions.
Longitudinal data could track how perceptions evolve alongside fertility intentions and behaviors. Couple-level analysis could examine how partners navigate uncertainty together. Cross-national comparisons could determine whether these patterns reflect Swedish institutions or appear more broadly. Cross-temporal comparisons could show whether recovery uncertainty always affected fertility or emerged recently with globalized labor markets.
Study Constraints and Broader Context
Small subgroups create uncertainty: 59 individuals reported poor recovery prospects, 104 couldn’t assess them, 7 combined poor prospects with job insecurity, 18 foreign-born individuals were unsure. The cross-sectional design prevents tracking how changing recovery perceptions affect fertility decisions over time. The measure captures one dimension of adaptive capacity (employment prospects) but not financial reserves, family support networks, or psychological adaptability.
This research is another challenge the second demographic transition thesis. That theory holds fertility decline reflects cultural shifts toward individualism and post-materialist values rather than economic constraints. Economic factors haven’t vanished. They’ve transformed. Affording children remains relevant but now runs through narrative construction. Can you build a coherent life story that includes children? Economic volatility disrupts that narrative construction not by making children too expensive but by making long-term commitments too unpredictable. Economic forces operate through culture, cognition, and meaning-making.
If fertility decline reflects values alone, policy has limited leverage. You can’t mandate that people want more children. If fertility decline reflects structural economic uncertainty preventing people from having children they desire, policy can intervene by restoring capacity to imagine stable futures. Contemporary fertility decline might represent not just delayed childbearing but an expanding group of people who want children but can’t reconcile that desire with the economic futures they envision. The demographic consequences would be profound. The required policy responses would reach far beyond increasing parental leave or subsidizing childcare.
The pointing being
This decline in fertility intentions requires better theories and better measures of uncertainty. This study distinguishes risk (calculable probabilities) from unpredictability (inability to form expectations), specific threats from general volatility, material conditions from subjective perceptions. It demonstrates that “I don’t know” carries substantive information rather than representing missing data.
Will people facing genuine uncertainty today eventually have children they desire under better conditions? Or are we watching a permanent contraction in who becomes a parent and under what circumstances?