Who Will Speak for the Girlboss?

America's fertility rate is falling. The culprit isn't necessarily who you think.

Hello, friends. Just an hour down I-20 from Family Matters HQ lies that tradition unlike any other, The Masters, and the Augusta forecast looks like it will be a perfect weekend for some championship-caliber golf. One of these years, I just know some well-connected Family Matters reader (I know they’re out there!) will hook me up with some tickets…but until then, if it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• Girlboss, Interrupted: American fertility hits new lows. Who can we blame?

• It’s Me, Hi: Commonplace

• Parting Shots

Girlboss, Interrupted

American fertility rates continue to decline and conservatives know who to blame: the much-dreaded and -derided “girlboss.” Katie Miller, the podcast host who previously worked as communications director for both Vice President Mike Pence and the Department of Government Efficiency, warned her followers that “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” saying that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Emma Waters, analyst at the Heritage Foundation and author of the recent “Lead Like Jael,” posted that “‘Girl-boss feminism’ has a body count — in birth rates.”¹ At Evie, Lisa Britton blamed the media, academia, and government for denigrating motherhood at the cost of “skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among women who traded family for boardrooms.”

This is, of course, nothing new. One of the most clarifying explications of this theory comes from a May 2022 speech by Helen Andrews, arguing that the reason “the lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does [is] because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie.” She encouraged the Republican Party to dispense with the fiction that it can champion both stay-at-home moms and working ones: “Once you lead women down the primrose path of thinking they can have a career just like a man and also the family that they want, then millions of women are going to try and do that.”

I think there’s a pretty obvious reason as to why the “blame the girlboss” strategy for fertility decline is wrong, and then a more subtle claim that’s perhaps a little more defensible. Before we get there, let’s look at what the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics tells us.

Stock photo via Kampus Productions/Pexels

If you wanted to oversimplify, you could say this is the most important chart for understanding fertility decline in America since we hit “peak baby” in 2007:

Married birth rates have dropped a tick from where they were, but have largely fluctuated around 80 to 90 births per 1,000 married women of childbearing age for the past three decades. A relative constant can’t explain a variable. The biggest change has been among that traditional bugaboo of social conservatives, unmarried childbearing. To take a simple counterfactual, if the birth rate among unmarried women (including teenagers) had remained where it was in 2007, the U.S. would have avoided the bulk of its post-Great Recession “baby bust.”

Any theory of fertility decline has to account for the fact that college-educated women are more likely than their non-college peers to marry; that childbearing outside of marriage is rapidly receding for a mixture of economic, technological and cultural factors, particularly for working-class women; and that marriage remains a strong predictor of childbearing.

Let me say that again to stress it — the post-2007 decline in fertility is heavily, though not exclusively, driven by falling birth rates among single, non-partnered women, accelerated by falling rates of relationship formation. (While it doesn’t play out exactly the same across the globe, this finding has been broadly confirmed by writers as varied as Alice Evans and John Burn-Murdoch.) A straightforward reading of the “let’s blame the girlbosses” hypothesis fails to account for these social changes.

We can further unpack this by looking at the Wall Street Journal graphic shared by Miller, which shows the massive decline in births to teenage girls:

Katie Miller@KatieMiller

Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72%. Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth. For the first time ever, birth rates for women in their late 30s have surpassed those in their early 20s. Our biological

1:03 PM · Apr 9, 2026 · 26.8K Views

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64 Replies · 47 Reposts · 191 Likes

Miller suggests she finds this lamentable, an interestingly far cry from the bipartisan consensus that led to the creation of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The fall-off in teen births isn’t limited to teens, though; the biggest relative decline is among women in their early 20s, and women in their late 20s have seen births head downwards ever since the Great Recession. That’s only modestly counterbalanced by increases in births to women in their 30s and a small rise in women over 40.

For college-educated women, the story is predominantly one of marriage deferred and parenthood delayed. The “girlboss” is getting married later than ever — but she’s getting married. She’s not having as many kids as her grandmother — but she’s having, on average, as many kids as her mom (or close enough to it). As Claudia Goldin’s book “Career and Family” explores in extensive detail, professional-class women had their gender revolution already and came out the other side.

But for women without a college degree, the picture is different — they are still living through shifting social and economic realities. Black women now have lower fertility rates than whites. Hispanic women, too, are seeing fertility fall.² And, on average, minority women will be in lower socioeconomic strata than the white corporate strivers who we tend to think of as “girlbosses.”

As the cultural critic who goes by Miri Vinni on Twitter pointed out, lumping these trends under the “girlboss” umbrella obscures more than it clarifies. I admit to only partially keeping an eye on the cottage industry, but to my eye it seems like only fairly recently, as in a 2022 BusinessWeek profile that typified the genre, that there seemed to be an attempt to redefine “having it all” from meaning “women can have a high-powered career and kids” to “women can have a high-powered career instead of kids.”

Likewise, Christina Pushaw notes that the “girlboss” was never meant to mean “woman who has no family.” Corporate-friendly feminism in its original guise was explicitly about “having it all” — both a career and a family — as distinguished from the more anti-nuclear family campus feminism that typified the posts you might read on Jezebel. The leading prophets of 2010s-era “Leaning In,” like Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Wojcicki, and Marissa Mayer, thought they were expanding the choice set for ambitious young women who wanted to both make sure their bio got to the “Who We Are” corporate leadership web page and made sure that bio mentioned being the proud mom of a kid or two.

As Pushaw notes, this vision can be dinged for being too unrealistic for most people to aspire to. Most women weren’t trying to balance running Yahoo! while pregnant, and some of the company-first, family-later messaging clearly rubbed many conservatives (and some feminists!) the wrong way. The conversation about flex work, part-time gigs, and jobs that can be done while watching young kids is a much-needed and interesting one. But the overdue task of breaking down the false dichotomy of “stay-at-home moms” vs. “40-hour-plus working moms” presumes that kids are already in the picture. Whether professional-class moms are or are not “having it all,” the “mommy wars” are not what’s causing our recent, post-2007 plunge in fertility.

By 2023, per the Census Bureau, women with a bachelor’s or more were making up 45% of new moms; by the time we get the data for 2025, it could be up to half of moms will have a college degree.³

Much of this is obviously due to rising educational attainment, but it’s also attributable to rising wage growth, tight labor markets and increased consumption opportunities for workers at the bottom of the income distribution. They increasingly don’t need to get married for reasons of economic necessity, and the landscape of lower-income men isn’t compelling them to do so for personal ones. So they’re abstaining from relationships, which leads them to abstain from parenthood.

It’s hard to think many, save the most outré anti-nuclear family radicals, find this a desirable long-term outcome. Fewer partnerships, fewer marriages, and fewer kids will mean more loneliness and heartache even before you get to the economic and political consequences. But my reading of the evidence makes it hard for me to lay this at the feet of the “girlboss.” The strongest form of the argument might be that by telling women they could advance to the top of corporate America, the “Lean In” generation set a tone that working-class women couldn’t live up to; that by saying women could seek both professional advancement and a family life they inadvertently pushed lower-status women to only aim for the former.

But even that, more defensible story feels like it’s giving elites more power than they actually have. Do many women without a college degree aspire to the work-life balance of a corporate titan? Or are there decisions driven more by a rising standard of living and real wage growth that allows them to be choosier about their relationships and feel the opportunity cost of parenthood much more strongly?

One of the best reported pieces on this dynamic came from the New York Times team of Sabrina Tavernise, Claire Cain Miller, Quoctrung Bui, and Robert Gebeloff in 2021, in which they explored how rising wages and the sense of increased opportunity (and opportunity costs) pushed more young working-class women to prioritize economic stability prior to forming a family. Earlier this year, the Times followed up with an article stressing the control that increased economic potential gave women:

“Saje Fedrick, 28, who works in the kitchen at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant in northeastern Pennsylvania, said all of her friends have jobs, but few have children. The reason, she said, ‘has a lot to do with the men.’ She said they watched their mothers or aunts struggle without financial independence. ‘We really started to see how men treated women — like, “I’m a provider, so I can do this,’” she said. “‘I have control over you.”’ Now, women have their own money, she said, and ‘men are shaking in their boots.’”

That dynamic doesn’t seem healthy or conducive to a healthy marriage culture. But it’s a very different one than arguing about the work-life choices of women with a college degree, which feels increasingly like debating the precise placement of deck chairs on the Titanic. The underlying dynamic for the non-college population feels more about male “marriageability” (understood beyond just earnings power) than female careerism.

It’s good — necessary, even — for both men and women to examine one’s vocation, skills, and the needs of one’s family. But beating up on the “girlboss” without beating up on her presumably male equivalent “boss” feels at times like it’s going for some cheap clapter rather than interrogating what could help more women find a spouse and have children. Those dynamics look very different for women below the median income than those whose earnings potential gives them the flexibility and opportunity to choose the right path for her. Restoring marriage among Americans without a college degree is a different, far bigger, challenge than picking at corporate elites — but America’s fertility decline won’t ever be reversed unless we figure it out.

It’s Me, Hi

At Commonplace, the journal of American Compass, I reflect on the legacy of Paul Ehrlich, and how today’s functional anti-natalism ended up giving his ideas a longer shelf life than they deserved:

“We don’t overtly punish families with higher taxes, but we do ask them to bear the rising burden of raising children individually while socializing the costs associated with old age. Our approach to housing privileges the financial concerns of the elderly and the environmental implications on the spotted owl over the need to ensure supply grows to meet demand. The resulting high prices make more households hesitate to settle down and have kids. And we hardly need the FCC to sanction people who have big families, or formal awards to celebrate the decision not to reproduce; we have TikTok and the ladies of The View to handle that.

“In too many cases, our functional anti-natalism is slowly turning Ehrlich’s dream of population decline into reality. What’s needed is an explicit political and cultural push in the opposite direction.”

The Long Shadow of ‘The Population Bomb’

The piece was also syndicated by RealClear Policy.

Parting Shots

• The Department of Health and Human Services has released new Title X guidance that encourages clinics who receive federal funds to explore natural family planning methods and includes an emphasis on recognizing that “family planning” can mean both avoiding and achieving pregnancy (Politico)

• Jonathan Cohn reports on a new health care white paper from the Center for American Progress, urging Democrats to examine the use of price caps to limit costs rather than focusing all their energies on Medicare for All/Some/All-Who-Want-It big swings (The Bulwark)

• Emma Green reviews the aforementioned “Lead Like Jael” amidst the ongoing conversation about what Christian motherhood should look like today (The New Yorker)

• Jerusalem Demsas uses Jane Austen and Gaussian distribution to argue that having kids is one of the last high-variance choices facing today’s young adults, which might explain why many are reluctant to choose it (The Argument)

• Amid the fractures between the “MAGA” and “MAHA” wings of the Trump coalition, Dr. Matthew Loftus would like to see more focus on making good food cheaper and easily available, and less on quick fixes and symbolic gestures (Christianity Today)

• A recent working paper examines the role of building codes in driving up housing costs, encouraging industry to “distinguish true minimum safety standards from the many code provisions that are more ‘aspirational’ in nature.”

• Audrey Goodson Kingo reports on the expansion of school holidays — such as the five holidays to the NYC calendar in the last decade — to examine where a commitment to pluralism interacts with the primary function of public schooling (New York Magazine).

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

1. I have not yet listened to it, but Emma unpacks her book’s argument with Oren Cass on today’s Commonplace podcast:

Neither Girlboss, Nor Tradwife with Emma Waters

2. Though that is complicated, as Lyman Stone notes on Twitter, by immigration changes and a more fluid ethnicity identification.

3. The graph shows the overall number, not normalized for the share of population in each educational bucket, because obviously most women under 22 haven’t had a chance to get a bachelor’s degree yet.