Population Research Discovery Seminars
Paradoxes of Childlessness in Two Divergent Family Contexts
Holly Hummer, Sociology, University of British Columbia
Parrington Hall Room 360
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
05/30/2025
12:30-1:30 PM PT
360 Parrington Hall
Co-Sponsor(s):
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.
Holly Hummer is a current Visiting Scholar at the CSDE and will be joining the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in July. Her work is broadly focused on mechanisms shaping individuals’ family and employment pathways and on how these pathways play into broader demographic and social patterns. Much of this work is qualitative and integrates family sociology, feminist and gender scholarship, cultural sociology, and population studies. She has published multiple solo-authored articles, including in the Journal of Marriage and Family and Population and Development Review. Before journeying to the West Coast, Holly received her PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and a BA in International Studies from Middlebury College.