Paradoxes of Childlessness in Two Divergent Family Contexts – Dr. Holly Hummer

Posted: 5/21/2025 ()

We are looking forward to hosting Holly Hummer from The University of British Columbia on Friday, May 30th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

When: 05/30/2025, 12:30-1:30 PM PT

Where: Parrington Hall Room 360

To Join By Zoom: Register HERE

In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined the role of macro-level context in enabling or constraining individuals’ reproductive and parenthood decisions. Yet, we know less about the role of context in shaping what it means to remain childless—a historically stigmatized status—today. This presentation draws on in-depth interviews with 157 non-mothers in the U.S. and Japan to examine if and how individuals without children experience and evaluate childlessness differently by country. When analyzed in comparative perspective, women in Japan were more likely to frame childlessness as increasingly normalized and justifiable via entrenched gender inequalities whereas women in the U.S. were more likely to emphasize the socially isolating and publicly contested nature of childlessness, often drawing on moral logics to then justify their non-motherhood. To contextualize these narrative divergences, I offer two mechanisms that emerged as relevant in women’s interviews: the perceived (in)flexibility of becoming and being a “good” mother and national demographic conditions. Overall, findings illustrate how macro-level structural and cultural factors complicate the status of not having children, leading to diverse social experiences and sense-making strategies.