Teaching fertility and gender wage gaps in macroeconomics: Diagrammatic models for undergraduate and postgraduate courses

Economics education remains male-dominated, prompting renewed attention to curriculum content. Despite their relevance to demographic change and female labor supply, models of fertility and gender wage gaps are largely absent from economics textbooks because of their mathematical complexity. This paper develops teaching-oriented, diagrammatic adaptations of seminal fertility models in mainstream macroeconomics, making them accessible for use in postgraduate and intermediate undergraduate courses. It presents teaching adaptations of a base model in which childrearing relies solely on women’s time and an extended model in which purchased childcare may substitute for women’s time. For postgraduate instructors, it shows how familiar indifference-curve and isoquant-isocost diagrams can be used in a scaffolded sequence with low-stakes assessment to develop student intuition for how changes in gender wage gaps affect fertility, including the possible reversal of fertility decline at advanced stages of development. For undergraduate instructors, it provides guidance on using fertility-demand and Solow-type capital accumulation diagrams in lectures, together with structured exercises and advanced extensions that interrogate the models’ assumptions from mainstream and feminist macroeconomic perspectives. Overall, the paper offers practical teaching materials that broaden the scope of macroeconomics education and support more inclusive instruction.