The Limits of Tech in Resolving Low Fertility Rate

The tech industry, as it has with many other fields, has revolutionized the process of mating for the younger generation. Ease-to-use dating apps, led by pioneers like Tinder, have now proliferated, with each service increasingly targeting niche markets, based on socio-cultural backgrounds, sexual orientation, shared interests, geography, and lifestyle. Better user interfaces have been accompanied by better algorithms. Automation takes over the painful process of deciding who are potentially suitable matches among an almost endless stream of candidates when so little firsthand information is available about them.

The use of tech in assisting the human mating process has the potential to go beyond just helping strangers meet up in real life. Instead, it has the potential to help craft a whole architecture around the family-building process, starting from dating and marrying, to giving birth to and raising children. In particular, beyond matching singles to help them develop romantic relationships, matching platforms can tweak their functionalities to supply users with other needed human networks, whether it be nannies to look after their children, tutors to educate them, and maids to manage the households as they continue their careers.

Yet, even as technology allows strangers to more easily connect and be acquainted for both romantic and economic purposes, the ever more expedited and capable matching of supply and demand inevitably runs up against the sociocultural realities of taking the plunge. While technology can present opportunities and means for people to connect, whether people actually start talking to each other is up to their personal decision-making. And that personal decision-making is much more a function of their intrinsic motivations and incentives rather than the increasingly negligible limits of technology.

Motivations and incentives for strangers to connect to raise children are especially curtailed in a country like Japan, where social stigma for outsourcing childrearing to non-family members persists. Whereas places like Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have a long history of importing migrant workers to cook, clean, and babysit, neither Japanese law nor Japanese public sentiments have allowed for a similar structure to be put in place. Even if online resources are present, sociocultural values prevent them from being fully utilized.

The economy of childrearing also makes hiring external helpers not so feasible for many. Stagnant wages among Japanese youths increasingly require both spouses to work full-time, often with significant overtime hours, to make ends meet even when there is not a child requiring extra expenses. With both money and time in short supply, young couples have increasingly come to see having children as a luxury in itself, rather than a social norm that comes after marriage. Such social views based on economic realities cannot be transformed by technology alone.

The presence of social norms against the very idea of having and raising children means that for technology firms to truly make a long-term difference in how people think about romance and marriage, simply matching them with potential partners is not enough. Instead, they need to first lead in their own behaviors toward creating a society that values more work-life balance and provides all the societal and economic support that couples need to become parents. Leading behavioral changes will start with their operations and expand in how they handle relationships with business partners and employees.

One way is for the firms to participate more in the political process, lobbying governments for legislation that makes it easier and more affordable for individuals, most importantly their employees, to hire external help should they decide to have children. Those would mean more investment in training programs for nannies and maids, initiatives to supplement their pay with government subsidies, and loosening restrictions on hiring such personnel from outside the country. As the tech sector becomes an increasingly important engine of growth, they need to leverage its position for increased political influence.

The other, and perhaps more important, way for tech firms to help increase childbirth is to become role models for assisting employees with children. Flexible hours that allow parents to take care of children-related matters during working hours, ease in getting leaves, and wide adoption of maternity and paternity leave, with little penalty for those who return from such leaves, would all signal to society at large that it is possible for a company, and society as a whole, to be innovative, productive, and also children-friendly. These policies go much beyond what technologies the company sells.