What share of women reach the end of their childbearing years without having children?

This chart focuses on the share of women who had no births by the end of their childbearing years. The horizontal axis shows the woman’s birth year.

Around 18% of those born in the 1910s in the United States had no children. For the following generations who grew up during the “baby boom”, the share with no children dropped to 5%. Since then, this figure has risen and fallen again.

In Sweden, the share of women without any children has remained relatively stable at around 12% for women born between the 1950s and 1970s.

The trend in Japan and Spain has been different: the share of women with no children has grown steeply over recent generations. In Spain, the figure nearly doubled in a decade: from 10% for women born in 1960 to almost 20% for those born in 1970. In Japan, it almost tripled in twenty years.

Explore this data for twenty more countries →

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “What share of women reach the end of their childbearing years without having children?” by Saloni Dattani, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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