Social stratification, gender, and attitudes towards voluntary childlessness in Europe: A double machine learning approach

Childnessness, and its links with educational change and inequality, is emerging as a key issue in the study of population change. In this paper we study the intersection between social stratification and gender in shaping the gendered attitudes towards voluntary childlessness in Europe, using data from two rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). The ESS includes a randomised design that allows to derive experimental results on gender attitudes. We apply a double machine learning approach and find that, in general, higher education has an impact on more favourable attitudes. Our findings are consistent with educational expansion having a causal role in the increase of favourable attitudes towards childlessness in Europe