Societal foundations for explaining low fertility: Gender equity

Abstract

BACKGROUND Gender equity theory in relation to fertility argues that very low fertility is the result of incoherence in the levels of gender equity in individually oriented social institutions and family-oriented social institutions. The salience of gender to the fertility transition is strong in theory but not as strong in specification of testable hypotheses, as has been pointed out in the literature. OBJECTIVE The paper aims to clarify the specification of gender equity theory through a discussion of the difference between equity and equality and to suggest methods that might be applied to test the theory. METHODS The theory is restated and further developed using literature from differen..