Childfree - Statistics and Research

Statistics and Research

Overall, researchers have observed childfree couples to be more educated, more likely to be employed in professional and management occupations, more likely for both spouses to earn relatively high incomes, to live in urban areas, to be less religious, to subscribe to less traditional gender roles, and to be less conventional. Economist David Foot of the University of Toronto concluded that the female's education is the most important determinant of the likelihood of her reproducing. The higher the education, the less likely she is to bear children. (Or if she does, the fewer children she is likely to have.)

In 2003, a U.S. Census study found that a record 19% of U.S. women age 40–44 did not have children (compared with 10% in 1976). Being childless was considered bizarre in the 1950s. A 2004 U.S. Census study found that 18.4% of U.S. women age 35–44 were childless.

The number of women in the U.S. who are without children is unknown, but the National Center of Health Statistics confirms that the percentage of American women of childbearing age who define themselves as childfree (or voluntarily childless) rose sharply in the 1990s—from 2.4 percent in 1982 to 4.3 percent in 1990 to 6.6 percent in 1995.