Women's Family and Work Decisions and Their Impact on Economic Growth
November 10, 2026
As it often has with issues involving women in the economy, the Atlanta Fed published research in 2026 that spoke directly to a cultural touchpoint—the declining birth rate in the United States.
The working paper, titled "What's Behind Declining Birth Rates in the US?", proposes that the declining birth rate stems from increasing medical difficulty conceiving and bearing children, likely related in part to environmental factors, as well as the shifting priorities and preferences among women of child-bearing age. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the most recent provisional birth and fertility rates for 2025, and the working paper leaned in part on those data.
The working paper is part of the Atlanta Fed's efforts to understand the dynamics of the overall economy including the ways women interact with the economy, how these interactions differ from those of men, and the effect women have on labor supply and consumer spending and saving.
This research recognizes the significant impact women exert on the macroeconomy, according to Julie Hotchkiss, an Atlanta Fed research economist and policy adviser and the corresponding author of the working paper. (She also discussed this research in a recent episode of Economy Matters, the Atlanta Fed's podcast.) Hotchkiss has spent years studying women in the economy for many years. "Women make up over 47 percent of the labor force, so it's important to be mindful of factors that influence women's employment outcomes and participation decisions differently than they do for men when considering the question of full employment," she said, pointing out that in its policy making role, the Fed needs to anticipate factors influencing economic growth. As Hotchkiss noted, "workforce participation is an important factor in determining economic growth."
As its first paragraph makes clear, the 2026 paper explicitly ties women's family formation decisions to the larger economy. "Declining birth rates in the United States have generated renewed concern about long-run economic performance, as slower population growth directly shapes the trajectory of consumption demand, labor supply, and the fiscal capacity needed to support an aging population," the researchers wrote. Potential consequences of a lower fertility rate include "less consumption demand and less potential innovation in the long-run, negatively impacting economic growth," as other research has shown "the roughly five percentage point drop in average global birth rates since 1985 has cost the world economy 25 percentage points of economic growth."
This latest paper on birth rates aligns with another piece of Hotchkiss's research, "Labor force exit decisions of new mothers," an article published in 2011 in Review of Economics of the Household, written in collaboration with fellow Atlanta Fed research economist Melinda Pitts and Mary Beth Walker, an economist at Georgia State University. That article began with one factor that has always affected female labor force participation decisions: "the presence of children." Whereas existing research at that time tended to focus on the impact of public policies, such as maternal or paternal paid leave, this research examined how factors such as education level and marital status affected a woman's decision to depart the labor market after childbirth. The article concluded that "declining labor market exit rates among women upon the birth of a child made an about-face in the late 1990s and started to rise." The authors find that this change was driven by a behavior shift among less-educated, single women.
In addition to its research into the role of women in the economy, the Atlanta Fed provides several digital tools that offer information on women in the labor market. One tool, the Labor Force Explorer, allows users to create a chart depicting labor force participation rates and the reasons why people have departed the workforce. The tool allows the user to see that a greater share of women than men cite family responsibilities for not working or seeking a job outside the home. Another tool, the Wage Growth Tracker, allows the user to compare wage growth for men and women separately.
The Atlanta Fed's research into various aspects of women in the economy are threads in the larger tapestry of related research by economists at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the 11 other Reserve Banks. Other recent System research includes a paper that revealed that, although a gender gap exists in total bankcard limits, the amount is economically small; and a paper that observes that during periods when women's workforce participation was growing, total productivity rose.
Findings such as these provide Hotchkiss and her fellow researchers with plenty of fodder for further exploration. "Across the system, both micro- and macro-economists realize that if we ignore changing behavioral patterns among women—and also men, for that matter—we do so at our own peril," she said.