Increases in the average age at first birth and in the proportion of
women remaining childless have extended the total number of years that
women spend childless during their reproductive lifetime in several
countries. To quantify the number of years that reproductive-age women
live without children, we introduce the cross-sectional average length
of life childless (CALC). This measure includes all the age-specific
first-birth information available for the cohorts present at time t;
it is a period measure based on cohort data. Using the Human Fertility
Database, CALC is calculated for the year 2015 for all countries with
long enough histories of fertility available. Results show that women in
the majority of the studied countries spend, on average, more than half
of their reproductive lives childless. Furthermore, the difference
between CALCs in two countries can be decomposed to give a clear
visualization of how each cohort contributes to the difference in the
duration of the length of childless life in those populations. Our
illustration of the decomposition shows that (1) in recent years, female
cohorts in Japan and Spain at increasingly younger ages have been
contributing to more years of childless life compared with those in
Sweden, (2) the United States continues to represent an exception among
the high-income countries with a low expectation for childless life of
women, and (3) Hungary experienced a strong period effect of the recent
Great Recession. These examples show that CALC and its decomposition can
provide insights into first-birth patterns.