Fertility differences by gender in racially and ethnically mixed U.S. couples

Hypotheses on fertility levels between men and women with different races and ethnicities (exogamous union fertility) “apply equally when the minority group partner is the woman or the man.” The hypotheses generated on this topic include stigma, in-between, pronatal, and assimilative fertility. As an alternative to these hypotheses, MPRC Director Michael Rendall and colleagues Margaret M. Weden and Joey Brown propose a gendered theorizing of exogamous union fertility, where the fertility preferences of either the woman’s or man’s race and ethnicity might dominate.

Their analyses reveal support for male-predominant patterns. The fertility level of the couple is closer to an endogamous union of the man’s racial and ethnic group than to an endogamous union of the woman’s racial and ethnic group. Rendall and colleagues hypothesize that women who select exogamous unions to realize their own fertility preferences could partially explain the finding of male-predominant patterns. No cases of female predominance were found, where the fertility of the couple is closer to that in an endogamous union of the woman’s race and ethnicity than to an endogamous union of the race and ethnicity of a man. A simple fertility model that includes predictors of the racial and ethnic groups of both men and women finds that the coefficients for the men are statistically significant.

These findings suggest that the standard demographic practice of using a woman’s racial and ethnic group downwardly bias estimates of fertility differences by racial and ethnic groups in the United States as exogamy becomes more common.

Margaret M. Weden, Michael S. Rendall, Joey Brown. (2025); Gender Asymmetry in the Fertility of Racially and Ethnically Exogamous U.S. Couples. Demography 62(3): 947–970; 1 June 2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11968125.