Last November, the Office of National Statistics released a clutch of data on parenting. Much of the information was what you’d expect: slight fluctuations in numbers reflecting changing patterns of behaviour – such as average family size decreasing to less than two children where the previous generation usually had 2.3 per household.

At the time, the Daily Mail picked up on the “revelation” that one in five women born in 1969 are childless today, compared to one in nine women born in 1942, dubbing the former group "generation childless.”

Yesterday, a writer in the newspaper’s Femail section resuscitated this generalisation and, after careful “investigation”, found the cause. Guess what? Yep, it’s men.

According to the stereotype, men are more reluctant to have children than women Credit: Alamy

Citing Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women, a support network for childless women, the article says that 10 per cent of women are childless due to infertility and another 10 per cent have chosen to be child-free. “That leaves some 80 per cent of women without children who have simply ended up in this situation,” it reports.

“Melanie Whitehouse is certainly one of these women. And she is clear about the cause of her childlessness: men.”

"The real cause of our increasing childlessness are deep, complex, and societal" Chris Moss

Now, I’ve got nothing against Melanie Whitehouse or any of the other women in the piece, but I have to object to the way men are being portrayed here.

If men aren’t providing women with babies, it’s for a host of reasons – and they're certainly more nuanced than the antiquated notions the article trots out. According to the report, we’re either ineligible throwbacks who are unwilling to do the dishes, or we’re consistently indecisive until we're grey and old and of little procreative use. Or we’re too busy looking out for “younger women with adoring gazes” who don’t insist on marriage and family. Or we are “Mr Distinctly Average”, too far from the dream lover a woman wants and needs to sow the seeds of true love.

No mention is made, anywhere, of choice, or contingency, or the ancient power of human impulse.

“The long hours culture doesn’t give men or women huge opportunities to meet each other in the first place” Irenee Daly

Psychologists can locate all kinds of pressure on people to breed (and not breed); it’s what homo sapiens have been doing since year dot. A primal urge. No doubt there are a few men who, if asked why they had kids, would admit that “my wife wanted to and, well, it keeps the peace”. But they’d be a minority – and who's to say they wouldn't be matched in number by women who replied the same about their husbands?

The real cause of our increasing childlessness are deep, complex, and – this is crucial – societal.

“The long hours culture doesn’t give men or women huge opportunities to meet each other in the first place,” says Dr. Irenee Daly of De Montfort University’s Faculty of Health and Life Sciences.

“You can add to this the housing crisis making it really difficult for a couple to buy a family home and the rental sector not catering particularly well for families (along with all the usual insecurities of that sector).

“Then there's the career stuff: zero hours contracts, unpaid internships, the rise in short term contracts at the expense of permanency, the expectancy in some sectors to move from pillar to post to pursue training and ‘experience’. It all delays people’s ability to put down roots and start a family.”

Long work hours can make starting a family difficult Credit: Alamy

This is all part of the changing nature of society – and of gender. As the two sexes reach parity in the workplace, our roles are sliding together, sweeping out the stereotypes of reticent fathers and diligent stay-at-home mothers. Put simply: men are now more likely to behave 'feminine', and vice versa.

"It is contemptuous to assume all childless women regret their position, just as it is simply absurd to blame it on men" Chris Moss

If men were once the stereotypical driving force behind a childless relationship, there's ample evidence to suggest they're now increasingly the prime-movers in pushing women towards having a family. We're more willing dads than our own fathers – and we're also better than them: according to one study, 70pc of British fathers say they play a bigger role in their children's lives than their own dads did.

Just as importantly, there are now more women who choose to act in a way that men have been doing for decades. Women who choose careers over family. Women who choose freedom over family. Women who choose to live their lives through a series of affairs. Women who choose to get divorced just when they might have been about to have kids.

Kim Cattrall has spoken out about being childless in the past Credit: PA

To view not having children as some sort of failure is to do a huge disservice to childless women and feminism. Yes, we can talk to a woman who has recently decided that she needs kids but feels it’s too late, but we should remember that we've caught her at an extraordinarily vulnerable moment in time. To properly understand her, we’d need to have asked her the same questions about love and children and marriage ten or twenty years earlier for comparison. And we’d have to ask her again in five or ten years – when, feasibly, she might be over the phase and happily pursuing a PhD or travelling around South-east Asia with a new lover.

It is contemptuous to assume all childless women regret their position, just as it is plainly absurd to blame it on men. If all these women in midlife haven’t got kids, we can surely assume that quite a few men in the same age group – at least those unlucky enough not to have shacked up with an “adoring” twentysomething – are living their lives without children.

Where is the concern for their needs, regrets, dreams? There is – unsurprisingly, perhaps – relatively little research into men’s paternity dilemmas, and most of that which exists is of the medical kind, focusing on infertility issues. But research by Keele University’s Robin Hadley into “involuntary childlessness” found that there was “no difference in level of desire for parenthood between childless males and females” and that “lone childless men and fathers have increased risk of death through suicide, addiction, injury, external violence, poisoning, lung and heart disease”.

Men and women, it seems, are very similar in their childbearing/rearing needs. Let's not point the finger at one for nixing the dreams of the other.

Childless men are at an increased risk of suffering from health issues Credit: Alamy

It's also worth pointing out that men, like women, have a biological clock – it just ticks a little slower. You can debate whether they have periods, or are broody, and whether our biology is influenced by external factors. But you can’t deny mortality. We’re all riding along on the same arrow towards death, and children are a symbolic force in the opposite direction.

Not having children can be a choice or an accident. It can be catastrophic or liberating. Having them can make people very happy or very unhappy. They should be treated neither as a prerequisite to success in life or a solution to it.

In many of the poorest countries, where reproductive health is near non-existent, women still have five, seven, ten kids. In the future, many women will choose not to have any. The trend is downward, and as poverty is reduced this will continue. The current members of the forty-plus group of women who don’t have kids are pioneers of what will have to happen soon across swathes of nations and generations. That won’t make them feel any better. But neither will calling them “generation childless”.