Why more and more women are choosing to be childfree

Chy, a 33-year-old account manager from the Midlands, has also found a community of like-minded women online. In real life, while her parents and close friends have been supportive of her being childfree, her wider family could not understand her decision.

“I come from an African background,” she says, explaining that many of her relatives are from a culture where “women are supposed to have kids”.

“Being someone with resistance to that idea was met with a lot of shock and disbelief.”

Chy wouldn’t feel comfortable being “responsible for someone else”. She says a child would “need the love I don’t think I could provide in abundance”.

Her priorities include pursuing her career and travelling, things she believes “would be a lot harder” with children.

Wanting to focus on a career is one of the key reasons women choose not to have children, the CSJ report states. It cites a survey of more than 1,500 18-35-year-old women living in the UK, commissioned by the New Social Covenant Unit in 2023, which found that of those women who don’t want to become mothers, 38% said this was because they wanted to advance their career.

Almost half of respondents cited the steep cost of childcare and 41% said they would want to move into a bigger house if they were to have children.

Chy thinks that mothers don’t get enough support and that the cost of childcare and the current parental leave system make it “harder for women to live life outside of just being a mum”.

She mentions one of her friends, who has had to cut her working hours to be able to do the school drop-offs and picks-ups.

“If those systems were to change, maybe my decision could have been swayed earlier on,” she tells me.

The CSJ report argues that, in the UK, we need to place “greater value on the role of being a mother”, both socially and in public policy, and that motherhood was “held in higher esteem” in the 20th century.