“Woman carries an infant” by World Bank Photo Collection is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Evolutionary researchers have long puzzled over declining fertility rates wanting to understand the reproductive decision-making process. One critical question for this research is: ‘who decides’? Some research assumes that women are the sole (or main) deciders, while others view it as either a collaborative or conflict-ridden decision between men and women – perhaps even including pressure or suggestion from their respective families. Sexual conflict, defined as a conflict between individuals of different sexes, may also contribute to our understanding of reproductive decision-making. If men and women have divergent preferences for offspring and both have power over the reproductive decision-making process, then this conflict and how it is resolved will influence how many children couples have.

An interesting finding from the anthropological literature is that women tend to have more children when they live near or with their husband’s kin – even more than when they live near their own kin. If the route to greater reproduction is through the help women receive, then this implies that women receive more help when they live with their husband’s kin compared to living near their own kin. This doesn’t conform to empirical observations that show that maternal kin, particularly maternal grandmothers, are typically more helpful alloparents. So, how can this surprising finding be interpreted? Some have hypothesized that women are being manipulated or coerced into having more offspring than they desire when living with their husband’s kin, providing a focus on the conflicts that may exist over reproductive decision-making. This line of thinking has also been extended to fertility decline more generally, where women are able to achieve their assumed preference for fewer children when they have more autonomy.

This study seeks to test these claims to determine: 1) how many children do coupled women and men report desiring in the future? 2) What factors associate with who wants more children? And 3) when differences occur, who achieves their preference?

Using data on 9,655 Indonesian couples surveyed from 1993-2015, we found that coupled men and women tend to desire the same number of future offspring, although when differences occur, men are slightly more likely to want more children than their wives (20.7% of couples vs. 14.5% where the reverse is true). This suggests that sexual conflict over future fertility within couples is relatively low. Second, living near kin (in the same community with either the wife’s or the husband’s parents) is associated with an increased likelihood that women want more future children than their husbands. This suggests that the prior finding that women have more children when they live near their husband’s kin may be driven by their desire for more offspring in these settings, possibly because this is an important route for social status for women living among their husband’s kin. Third, when we examine who achieves their preference for future offspring, we find that living near one’s kin is not associated with an increased likelihood of achieving one’s desired number of children. Similarly, women’s autonomy (as measured by household decision making and spousal age gap) is not associated with fertility outcomes. Our results show that women who marry at an older age are more likely to achieve their preference, and that women appear to be slightly more likely to achieve their preference overall, but that there are few strong associations with who achieves their preference.

In conclusion, our findings suggest that prior interpretations that women are coerced into having more children than they want when living near husband’s kin may actually represent women wanting more children in those contexts. Further, while women tend to want fewer children now than they did in the past and at the same time may have greater autonomy, it is unlikely that increased autonomy allowed them to achieve the goal of lowered fertility. In contrast, it is likely that greater opportunities for women resulted in changing preferences for children. Finally, sexual conflict over future fertility within couples seems relatively low in this context, as there were few differences between men and women over desired fertility.

Author biographies:
Kristin Snopkowski is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boise State University. Her research examines reproductive decision-making, including how kin cooperation and conflict influence reproduction.

James Joseph Nelson works outside academia in mixed-methods research, focusing on contextual inquiry and data-driven decision making. He teaches anthropology on a part-time basis and remains interested in determinants of fertility. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn.