FutureDad 32: The Fertility Rate Crash has One Cause

‘Everything is incentives, the rest is commentary.’ - Stephen Landsburg

The world’s fertility rate has crashed in the last few decades. Some selected examples from 1950 to 2021 are¹: -

South Korea’s dropped from 5.72 to 0.82.

Italy’s dropped from 2.45 to 1.21.

Morocco’s dropped from 7.18 to 2.26.

Canada’s dropped from 3.31 to 1.46.

Ecuador's dropped from 6.09 to 2.20.

New Zealand’s dropped from 3.49 to 1.62.

I cite a country from every continent, both emerging market and developed, to demonstrate the multi-regional distribution of the problem. No region on Earth is in good shape, fertility-wise. This is a crucial point that is evaded by many commentators, usually to then bemoan their own country’s lack of child care facilities, affordable housing or some other pet peeve. These are lies by omission.

It’s a curious phenomenon that a global problem with real-world civilisation-ending effects is so badly understood. I will select a recent well-attended example. In a 2025 Kurzgesagt YouTube video about South Korea’s demographic collapse, with over 10 million views², most of the top-liked viewers’ comments cited a non-reason as a reason. It’s evidence of the lazy thinking of the modern world and provides a startling example of the ‘unwisdom’ of crowds. It behoves us therefore to be particularly careful in our analysis. A problem of this civilisational scale obligates a cross-examination of the assumptions and the counter-examples before identifying the actual cause.

Sit-rep

The summary of the situation is the following. It is clear that everywhere, in every nation state, the total fertility rate (TFR, number of births per woman) has dropped decade after decade since the 1950s³. Note that this is not the same as saying ‘year after year’ since there are small, non-persistent increases in some years, in some places (we’ll come to that later). The overall trend is markedly and unmistakably down. In every region on Earth, rich or poor, big or small, advanced or underdeveloped. So graphically, in the chart below⁴, which compares the 1950 TFR horizontally to the 2021 TFR vertically, there is not a single country to the left of the diagonal line. So for anyone still hypnotised by local concerns, this should serve as a splash of cold water to the face.

Now we know it’s everywhere, how has the overall global number changed? Statista.com shows the world’s fertility rate dropping from approximately 5 in the 1950s to 2.2 in the 2020s⁵. The lancet.com calculated a world-wide decrease from 4.84 to 2.23 over the same period⁶. So both these sources (and others) indicate the world fertility has dropped by more than half in seven decades. If that happened to dolphins, we would never hear the end of it.

The search for the cause

To determine the foundational cause we will first account for possible exceptions. A robust, comprehensive explanation would have to explain anomalies. We have to ask - where, at the sub-country level, is it not happening? Actually, it’s not so much where, but who: one group is the Orthodox (Hasidic) Jews, mostly residing throughout Israel. That group’s TFR has hovered around six since the 1950s according to the UN⁷. Conversely, Israel’s national TFR itself has dropped overall, from 3.79 in the 1950s to 2.90 by 2021.

There is an important devil in this detail that ‘... between 1960 and 2016, the TFR of Christians dropped from 4.7 to 2.1; ... Druze [a religious sect] fertility fell from 7.3 to 2.3; and Muslim fertility from ... 9.2 ... to 3.3.⁸’ We’re getting clues as to the origin here. This speaks to a specific behavioural source sustaining or crushing the fertility rate, or as taubcenter.org describes it, the numbers are ... ‘testament to the numbers of adherents of those religions, Israel is still 75% Jewish, 20% muslim, and the rest Christian.’ In other words, the Orthodox Jewish TFR is stable, unlike the rest of the Israeli population, which is falling fast, like everywhere else. We shall make a mental note of that observation and come back to it.

There is one other sub-national group whose TFR is not suffering a steep decline: the US Amish. In fact, in the 2010s there was a spate of quite detailed articles⁹ exploring if or how the Amish population growth could eventually dominate the US itself, if trends persisted. Indeed, the Amish TFR has been stable around 5 since the middle of the 20^th century against a backdrop of a decline from 3.08 to 1.64 of the US itself, even including the Amish, and despite absorbing millions of immigrants from higher TFR nations in Latin America for several decades.

So now we have two sub-national, ethno-religious groups bucking the trend: the Amish and Orthodox Jews. Meanwhile, at a country level, as stated, there are no exceptions to the downward trend. However, there are two countries (amongst a small cluster of nations with similar characteristics) whose fall is mild in comparison to the rest of the world: -

Egypt: was 3.54 in the 1950s and 3.16 in 2021.

Chad: was 7.36 in the 1950s and 6.99 in 2021.

So to recap, our explanation of a foundational causal issue has to (a) explain the precipitous fertility decrease occurring across the world, (b) account for relatively mild drops in two countries, Egypt and Chad, and (c) explain why Orthodox Jews and the Amish appear immune. Note, I do not intend to claim that TFR-crash is 100% mono-factorial. But for the avoidance of doubt, I do seek to crush the persistent idiocy of many, in saying that it is anything but the cause I uncover in this essay, which dominates the issue.

We will now go through the three most cited candidate explanations one by one with the above (a), (b), and (c) explanatory requirements in mind, then a further five ancillary ones: -

1. Financial cause

2. Housing cause

3. Climate cause

4. Other causes (depression, micro-plastics, sperm count, urbanisation, ‘selfishness’)

1. Financial cause

Here we deal with the concept that poverty causes low fertility. What is poverty? If poverty is judged in terms of having no discretionary spending power, where everything you have goes on paying for essentials - a reasonable metric because it’s something that people everywhere strive for - then it means that we have less poverty everywhere compared to seventy years ago. Or as our friends at the WEF put it [over the last 25 years] ‘All regions have seen reductions in poverty, but there have been particularly sharp falls in China and India while sub-Saharan Africa has lagged’¹⁰. Or, if you prefer extreme poverty as a measure, over the same time frame as the TFR data, then the Worldbank publishes this¹¹: -

Or, according to the UN¹², when it comes to hunger, the proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen in line with the extreme poverty figures – down from 23.3% in 1990–1992 to 12.9% in 2014–2016.

The point is; however ‘poverty’ is measured, it has markedly decreased in recent decades.

But let’s go further back to emphasise the point. Pre-1950s, people had an even lower standard of living by 2020’s standards, especially in the West, where the birth rate decrease is most alarming. Across all western nations, qualitatively, the average 2025 family has a lifestyle equivalent to the upper-middle class of society of a century ago. This is in terms of leisure activities, clothes shopping, variety and volume of food, indoor plumbing and affordability of transport. If you compare to poverty levels of the 19^th century and before, developed nations’ citizens today live in greater material luxury than the kings and queens of centuries ago.

Furthermore, the poorest countries right now have, universally, a higher fertility rate than the richest. Clearly and self-evidently, financial hardship does not cause lower fertility.

Throwing money at it

In addition, let’s look at it from the opposite direction: the injection of money into the situation. What happens when bright sparks in government (see FutureDad 11: Why Government is so Dangerous’) decide to throw money at the problem? Several nations have already implemented various financial incentives, which have repeatedly failed to restore the fertility rate or check the downward trend. These include -

- Italy. Italy spent €3B on fertility measures including paying couples €800 per child in 2015. It achieved nothing.

- Sweden. For decades, Sweden spent billions on generous parental leave entitlements as well as monthly allowances. It achieved nothing.

- South Korea. President Yoon Suk Yeol set up a ministry to combat dropping fertility and had spent $16B on it by 2022. The funds - taken directly by force remember, including ironically from working non-mothers - provide baby bonuses, housing incentives, and free childcare. Yet by 2024 the fertility rate was still dropping and continues to be the lowest in the world at 0.74. Again, financial incentives have achieved nothing.

Half-hearted Hungarian humping

At first glance, Hungary appears to be the diamond in the dirt as far as the trad-cons are concerned. Here you have an avowed nationalist, Viktor Orban, deploying ‘family-friendly’ measures with some apparent success - the TFR has gone from 1.23 in 2011 to 1.56 in 2024¹³. In hungarianconservative.com, we read about a raft of measures which have repaired the damage¹⁴. Have they? Well ...

i. The measures are a mixture of policies, resulting in (they claim) the halving of abortions and creating 204,000 more marriages. What were these measures? Apparently the ‘state must use all means to support family formation’ and ‘includes more than thirty forms of family benefits’. As I’ve detailed in other essays, there is no otherwise free-flowing lane the state doesn’t want to park its gigantic bus in. The policies amount to tax credits, preferential loans, parent subsidy, nursery home availability and legal measures to ensure part-time work for mothers. It has led to an increase from 63% to 74% of mothers with under six children but also in work.

ii. Then what? Is everyone being married and having no abortions going to be enough? Will they get it to 100% of women working but still each having three children? Evidently not. Hungarian TFR has gone from 1.23 to 1.56. A fourteen-year effort to turn things around has resulted in a dead-cat-bounce of a 26% increase, which is about a third of the required 71% increase in fertility rate needed merely to bring it back to replacement level.

iii. Some of the Hungarian policy is admirable (abortions, unless you’re sub-human, are a bad thing), but a weak lemon drink compared the societal change needed. If these thirty or so bribes were sufficient we would have seen it in fourteen years. The rise to 1.56 is as much the result of pushing one’s absolute hardest to make family-making conditions exalted and pedestalised in a society, whilst still enforcing the goal for women to educate themselves and be even more super-equal in the workplace.

iv. Where will it get them? Using an online calculator¹⁵, a TFR of 1.56 applied to the Hungarian population of 9.6million gives a population of 621k in 250 years, six per cent of where it was.

So, let’s give a slow handclap for Hungary. The results in fact underline that a total blizzard of state-funded financial incentives is simply not enough.

I conclude that the systematic dampening of fertility is demonstrably NOT caused by financial strain on couples, families or countries, despite the initial, surface-level plausibility it has. It is not the cost of living. It is not inflation. These are challenges faced by families since antiquity, when we had 5-10 person families. To blame a recent and ubiquitous decreasing fertility rate on money worries or poverty, when counter-evidence abounds, is the height of willful ignorance. Ultimately, long-term, you cannot bribe your way to a healthy, self-sustaining population.

2. Housing cause

This is a variant of the financial argument and much of the same conceptual rebuttal can be used against it. In the Victorian age Britain’s fertility rate hovered around five¹⁶. Sometimes whole families lived in spare rooms, in complete deprivation compared to 21^st century living conditions ... all the while the population boomed. The lack of housing was irrelevant then as it is now. In present-day Britain no one needs to live in squalor, unless they really want to (narcotics, crime etc). Conversely, the larger the family you have now, the more hand-outs you will receive to help with housing. That assistance has not arrested the decline of fertility one bit.

If the problem were caused by housing then we would have seen an obvious counterbalancing effect manifest itself. We would see Japan’s fertility rate recover as its population drops and more houses come available. This has not happened. The fertility rate has continued its uninterrupted decline as housing availability increases. There is simply no correlation or defendable link between housing availability (or size) and the fertility rate.

3. Climate cause

There is nothing more egregious than this critically important issue being side-tracked by a pretend one (see ‘FutureDad 58: Climate Change is Not Even Wrong’). The pretence is that the multi-decade decline in fertility across all nations, but not all sub-national groups, is motivated by minute changes in average global temperature. That is the premise that we are expected to entertain.

Even if there is a fractional degree increase in the global average temperatures - which is very unlikely (see ‘FutureDad 38: Why Do the Elite Lie About Everything?’) - it is as likely to cause a precipitous drop in fertility as the recent increase in the number of extra-solar planets or the rapid increase in misuse of the word ‘like’. It is at a 3^rd or 4^th level of displacement away from coherently explaining the phenomenon.

Neither does it explain the two ethno-religious cultural exceptions (Jews and the Amish) or the decline in fertility from the 1950s to the 1970s, before climate change was even claimed. The mirror-image global cooling scaremongering of the 1970s did nothing to halt the decline either. So even if global climate change was not a discredited, politically motivated, grift (which it is), it is irrelevant. Essentially, like the whole religion itself, it is not even wrong.¹⁷

4. Other causes (depression, microplastics, sperm count, urbanisation, selfishness etc)

Most of the other reasons proposed are dismissable with consideration of the global nature and the exceptions. Or they are simple correlations with the root cause - a case of the ice-cream cones causing shark attacks.

Depression. Certainly this doesn’t help foster the desire to have children but there is no reason to suppose a steady upward trend of depression everywhere except Orthodox Jews and the Amish. Depression is a very real outcome of the actual root cause, discussed later.

Micro-plastics. This has merit initially - if found to be a definite sperm-killing toxin it certainly has the global span - but it doesn’t explain both exceptions, given it is claimed to be ubiquitous in the environment.

Sperm-count. Sperm count has decreased both globally and severely enough to be a plausible contributory factor. It is caused originally, it is claimed, due to health, smoking and environmental factors¹⁸. However, again, it doesn’t explain the exceptions.

Urbanisation. It is true that migration to cities is happening almost everywhere, but it has been the case for centuries, perhaps millennia. And how or why this specifically makes couples have fewer children is never explained, just assumed. When pressed, it transmutes into another reason, usually housing, financial or depression for which, see those sections.

Financial ‘selfishness’. This is prevalent but doesn’t account for the exceptions and is not an invention of the 1950s.

So, enough with the foreplay (pardon the pun), let’s get to it and discuss the principal, main, foundational cause of the global fertility rate crash.

Female Empowerment a.k.a. Feminism

I will first attribute the cause - feminism¹⁹ - to the three phenomena to be explained.

(a) Explain the world-wide precipitous fertility decrease

To explain the background I will describe the philosophical origin of the civilisational nukes already in flight.

‘Equality’ or ‘egalitarianism’ are not moral precepts. Equality is falsely conflated with ‘fairness’ to convince us it is. Inequality is not a gap we must all move the earth to close unless it is proven that it has a specific unjust or unethical origin. We’ve been tricked by this notion for the past century. Nothing is ‘fair’ in nature. Even identical twin brothers are not ‘equal’. It is certainly not fair to force society to close a claimed inequality gap between any groups and make slaves of all of us in the process (see ‘FutureDad 64: Superpowers Part IV - Objectivism’). And the further we go from nature the more expensive the apparatus is to maintain that distance and to shield ourselves from the consequences of that delusion.

This egalitarian collectivism has many angry, spiteful heads, communism being one. But feminism is the most dangerous head of the egalitarian hydra. Feminism stealthily encourages the demonisation of men and the Gynocentrism of society, based on the most fragile of pretexts, to then crush men on an individual basis, and crush society’s desire to make more of ourselves. So ... it is upon tasting the bitter fruits of this multi-decade egalitarian experiment that we find ourselves finally staring at the root cause.

Over the last few decades, right in line with the precipitous drop in fertility, feminism has taken hold of our voting, our institutions and our societal norms. This quasi-communist ideology has found a patch of fertile ground in our increasingly global corporations. There is no need for conspiracy when these corporations have a powerful mutual interest. They enact their survival instinct in a very precise way. Namely - to reduce labour costs.

Salaries are a corporation’s biggest fixed cost. There is a clear incentive to use women to double the available workforce and thus turbo-charge net profits. Therefore, powerful elites, with unlimited resources, have quietly set out procedures, in collusion with governments, to dissuade women from having babies and discourage girls from ever wanting them.

In Britain this social engineering started with the Equality Act in 1955. Now, decades later, when women are asked, their stated goals are tertiary education and a dazzling career (60% girls versus 46% boys plan to pursue a four-year college degree²⁰). It has now reached a level of championing women in the workforce that diversity hiring is the norm, not the exception, and the original equality hiring is routinely flouted in favour of female quotas (see ‘FutureDad 19: The Death of Customer Service’). It is in this myopic state that society celebrates female CEOs, but, of course, not female sewage workers.

The cost to our civilisation is enormous. There is nothing more insidiously destructive for the family than sending women out to work. When a woman decides to extend her years of education or work long hours chasing a career, she cannot be in two places at once. Reproduction becomes a third or even fourth place concern. Women who are staying late in an office to make Powerpoint slides or staying late in the library to study for their 2^nd master’s degree in child education are simply not able to have, or even be interested in having, babies.

They convince themselves that they’ll do it when their career hits its stride in their 30s. But no, they actually don’t. By then it’s too late. Women who start child-rearing in their 30s don’t have enough children to replace both them and their partner. As a result, women have never been sadder and more medicated. This tragically only makes the situation worse since the depressed are less likely to have children.

(b) Account for the relatively mild drops in two countries: Egypt and Chad.

Chad is a landlocked country occasionally at civil war and in an endless struggle against a strict flavour of islam in the form of Boko Haram. As a result, the global rise of feminism has been severely throttled locally. As an indicator of female political power, in 2019 ‘women held 12% of parliamentary seats in Chad’²¹, compared to approximately 33% in Europe²².

As for Egypt, although it has modernised at the pace of many Gulf states, throughout the 20^th century female political empowerment hasn’t followed suit. Following its 1919 revolution, women were not granted political rights when the country was liberated²³ and only gained universal suffrage in 1956, thirty years after most of the world. It is this delay which subsequently delayed their TFR from collapsing.

Furthermore, let’s examine as a group the countries with only moderate fertility rate drops, and currently high TFR: Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan, and the like. You’d find civil war, high fundamental religiosity, tribal uprising and rudimentary educational facilities. In a nutshell, far fewer master’s degree courses in Lesbian Dance Theory. This prevents the luxury beliefs of female empowerment from taking hold. The moderate and almost stable TFR is the main reason their populations are set to dominate developed nations in the 21^st century. At least up until the point that female empowerment decides to take hold.

(c) Explain why Orthodox Jews and the Amish appear immune.

Note firstly that these two stand even amongst their peers of other traditional religious groups like muslims and Catholics, which are simultaneously suffering TFR collapse everywhere. What is the difference between these seemingly comparable groups?

In a typical Amish household the man is ‘... the God-delegated authority over the woman and is responsible for her actions in the home and in society.’²⁴ Amish women do sometimes work/study ‘... but once married, they are typically expected to remain in the home, and almost always do so when they become mothers of small children.’

Even feminists are surprised by Amish women and the family unit - ‘At first glance Amish women appear to live under the domination of a male patriarchy legitimated by traditional religious teaching. Yet Amish women exhibit an unexpected self-confidence and strength.’²⁵ The self-confidence speaks to the duplicity of the feminist movement. It has gaslit society to believe that a woman at home is a meek, cowed woman. It was never the case in the past and not the case now.²⁶

What about orthodox Jews? The roles are clear - ‘There is no question that in traditional Judaism, the primary role of a woman is as wife and mother, keeper of the household.’²⁷ But there are exceptions and it is increasingly common practise for ‘Orthodox Jewish women are working outside the home and succeeding in careers of all kinds, just like other women in the 21st century.’ With one overarching proviso - ‘... reproduce as much as possible. It is considered a top rule which was commanded directly from God.’²⁸

How does that compare to muslims and devout Catholic groups? They do have a typical subservience to their husbands but it is not decreed by commandment that they reproduce. They study and work increasingly as often as their secular counterparts. Note the UK Parliament recently launched study initiatives like ‘Empowered Employment: Unlocking the Workplace for Muslim Women’²⁹ to absolutely no protest from muslims, famously noted for their violent protest of everything a millimetre distant from their faith, from books to depicting their prophet. Ironically this is one of the few paths left in which Britainistan may be delayed, see ‘FutureDad 72: Can Britain be Saved?’

The conclusion of the ethno-religious exceptions to fertility rate collapse is clear. Unless you decree it by commandment (authority) - e.g. Orthodox Jews - or by the socially enforced conventions of a moderately hard patriarchy - e.g. the Amish - even the soft patriarchies of modern muslims and Catholics will (and have) suffer a fertility drop. As for the complete absence of patriarchy in secular society, it’s just as clear. As the populations of Canada (TFR = 1.21), Chile (1.13) and China (1.02) will soon demonstrate, women don’t have a sufficient number of babies to prevent your country vanishing, unless you make the conditions conducive to it via either (1) religious decree or (2) moderate patriarchy. In short, if you want your country to demographically survive, choose one or both. There is no (3).

Feminism’s destruction of dating

There is one final nail in the coffin of TFR stability. The practise lap for human reproduction is dating. If things weren’t bad enough, feminism is destroying the dating market as well. Women invariably do not date down, which means in practise, dating someone earning less than them.³⁰ This is called hypergamy. Women seek masculine dominance and resources and men seek health and neoteny. Don’t complain about it, it’s nature.

If there is forced equality and feminism is championed, especially by corporations, to close a fictitious pay gap, then women earn more. This spawns a giant cohort of men who are no longer relationship material. Men have noticed this and are also walking away.

Female empowerment, whether in education or in the workplace, neatly conspires against all the vital relationship levers fundamental to successful pair-bonding. A specially concocted Fauci-inspired bio-weapon couldn’t do more damage to our ability to reproduce than the real-world plague of feminism.

TFR collapse versus military invasion

By implication of this, if you set your eye on conquering another country, yes, in keeping with tradition, you could do it militarily. But, if you saw it as a multi-generational project, you could just encourage the target country to empower women and then wait. Two hundred years should do it. Their population will be half the size, feminised, and pliant. Then you can just walk in and take it over. This is happening in The West, right now.

Conclusion

We have established that not only is there not the energy and opportunity for empowered career-women to have babies, their base-line desire in the dating market has been crushed by a phony dream of female supremacy. Women have girl-bossed too close to the sun and we, the entire world - bar the moderate patriarchies of ultra-orthodox Jews and the Amish - are all paying a heavy price for letting them.

Where does it leave us? The viability of our entire species itself is cratering, which will mean civil wars and occupations (a.k.a. mass immigration) will swell to bring patriarchies to imploding nations and the women within them will have their rights taken away anyway (see ‘FutureDad 52: The Long End of the Longhouse’). The global fertility crash will certainly not self-correct peacefully, whereby nations can thrive and prosper long-term, unless and until we relearn what we used to take for granted.

Which is: women are better at having babies, men are better at looking after them both.

FutureDad

1. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6.pdf

2. Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - ‘SOUTH KOREA IS OVER’ - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

3. Some nations very fast, some fast, a handful relatively slow.

4. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6.pdf (p2074)

5. https://www.statista.com/statistics/805064/fertility-rate-worldwide/

6. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6/fulltext

7. https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/fertility/completing-fertility/RevisedFriedlanderpaper.PDF

8. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/

9. https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-amish-268e3d0de87

10. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/07/how-much-global-poverty-fallen-past-25-years/

11. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/estimates-global-poverty-wwii-fall-berlin-wall

12. https://archive.foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Summer2016Backgrounder.pdf

13. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hungary/fertility-rate

14. https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture_society/hungarian-family-policy_children_marriage_maria-kopp-institute_family-friendly-government_fertility/

15. https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&title=&birth_rate=1.56&birth_age=18&immigration=1000&start_pop=9609000×pan=252&start_year=2025&pyramid=flat

16. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/plummeting-fertility-rates-in-the-uk-1800-to-2020.html

17. ‘FutureDad 58: Climate Change is Not Even Wrong’

18. https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/06/15/sperm-counts-are-declining-scientists-believe-they-have-pinpointed-the-main-causes-why

19. Some online sources will whitewash it by describing the cause as ‘ women’s access to education’, one BBC source even says ... falling fertility rates is a success story (almost ‘and that’s a good thing’)

20. https://www.deseret.com/family/2025/03/13/pew-research-survey-gender-gap-teen-experiences/

21. https://wechronicle.com/womens-suffrage/a-comprehensive-history-of-womens-suffrage-in-chad/

22. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/edn-20250307-1

23. Sorbera, L., 2014. Challenges of thinking feminism and revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2014. Postcolonial Studies, 17(1), pp.63-75.

24. https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-women-have-rights/#happy

25. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/cultures/nm06/documents/033

26. Husbands who were violent bullies were usually dealt with by his male peers.

27. https://mechon-mamre.org/jewfaq/women.htm

28. https://www.brooklynunpluggedtours.com/hassidic-jews-rules-beliefs-practices

29. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341575370_Empowered_Employment_Unlocking_the_Workplace_for_Muslim_Women

30. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/women-rule/2020/02/07/why-do-women-prefer-richer-men-488275