Making employment easier for women is clearly not related to birth rate. It seems to be inversely correlated with first world living status and education more than anything.
> It seems to be inversely correlated with first world living status and education more than anything.
Well, at least for Germany I can provide some anecdata: either you're on welfare and have the state fund your life including kids or you're rich. The middle class and especially the young (20-30y) population in the major cities simply often cannot afford kids, not with the exploded rents and the trend to unpaid (!) internships, year-limited contracts, "gig work" and other things making my generation's life a living hell. I'm 27 and lucky to have landed an unlimited employment contract. The whole situation reminds me more and more of the setting of Idiocracy, and that without the US president in that movie being obviously inspirational for the current real world one.
In addition the young population that fled the rural areas (due to e.g. job availability, the lack of public transport, any form of Internet faster than ISDN, ...) but left their parents/grandparents behind cannot rely on them to help with bringing up a child, further lowering the birth rate.
For Italy, the situation is even worse - depending on the source and demographic target, up to 70-80% of young people still live with their parents because they cannot afford their own home (https://www.thelocal.it/20161024/two-thirds-of-italian-mille...). Hard enough to... uh, get going with your partner when your parents are next room, much less actually wanting to raise a child.
1. Newer generation's extended adolescence
2. More selfish attitude (selfish with time and more materialistic than previous generations)
3. Lowered sperm count because of WIFI, Cell phones and ingesting large quantities of plastics and other chemicals, both from the goods imported from china and the pollutants in the air soil and water largely also from China.
4. High housing costs which are primarily caused by women now commonly working. A two income household can afford to pay much more for a home than the traditional one. So prices have risen to what people can commonly now afford (a sad affect of women giving up raising their own children, to essentially make nothing monetarily, but achieve a power that commonly splits their family apart from the resulting power struggle combined with the lack of co-dependence which traditionally incentivized parents to work through their problems at home, and consequently grow into better people with a satisfying relationship).
5. Kids used to mean status for women (and for men). Now it means you are a failure because you don't have a college degree and a career (very sad since raising a child to be a great person is actually the most important career that could ever exist. We are seeing the devastating affects in today's kids and young adults when child care programs raise kids).
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10216510/The-...
Really? I don't recall seeing any hand sewn backpacks in Japan- only commercially manufactured ones- but I wasn't looking that closely- so I am wondering if you have a citation for this interesting bit?