By now, you’ve probably heard that fertility rates are dropping all across the world. But when you dig deeper into the numbers, there’s a broader trend that doesn’t make much sense at first: for the first time ever, men are having fewer children than women. According to a new modeling study, the global average number of children a man is expected to have over his lifetime fell below that of women in 2024. This measure is known as the total fertility rate, or TFR. It’s mostly, if not almost entirely, been used throughout its life to track women, whose fertility rates have declined from 4.9 children per woman in 1952 to roughly 2.3 in 2023. For men, researchers had to estimate indirectly using population data . Until recently, men have averaged slightly more children than women. Times have changed, and that gap has closed, and now it has fully reversed.…