Women wanted more children in 2000s, but had fewer

As someone with mild concerns about dysgenic (albeit, with a normative lens that high intelligence and good looks are positive heritable traits) trends, I’m quite heartened that Marissa Mayer is pregnant. Of course she’s batting well below the average of some of her sisters, but you take what you can get in the game of social statistics. Quality over quantitative thanks to assortative mating.

This brings me to a follow up of my post from yesterday, People wanted more children in 2000s, but had fewer. A reader was curious about limiting the data set to females. Therefore, I did. The same general pattern seems to apply (the limitations/constraints were the same). The only thing I’ll note is that there were only ~40 women in the data set with graduate degrees in the 1970s who were also asked these particular questions, so take this with a grain of salt.

	Realized
	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
< HS	2.73	3.19	3.02	2.79
HS	2.67	2.91	2.59	2.22
Junior College	3	2.75	2.38	2.06
Bachelor	2.31	2.47	2.11	1.71
Graduate	2.11	2.07	1.89	1.56
< $20 K	2.52	2.89	2.57	2.23
$20-40 K	2.57	2.9	2.46	2.02
$40-80 K	2.91	2.95	2.49	1.99
> $80 K	3.08	2.86	2.35	1.95

	Ideal
	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
< HS	3.08	2.96	2.73	2.85
HS	3.04	2.89	2.61	2.97
Junior College	2.58	2.8	2.95	3.31
Bachelor	3.01	2.95	2.86	3.15
Graduate	2.73	2.52	3.63	3.02
< $20 K	3	2.84	2.79	3.04
$20-40 K	3.04	3.01	2.69	2.96
$40-80 K	3.06	2.83	2.89	3.06
> $80 K	3.13	2.87	2.84	3.06