Matt Yglesias has posted some charts showing that

1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common

2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing

Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon:

I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the general ppoulation. In other words, as more women attain advanced degrees the pool of those women become less atypical vis-a-vis the general population

To gauge the shift in education and peculiarity I only needed a few variables in the General Social Survey. I limited SEX to women, YEAR to 1992-1994 and 2006-2008, DEGREE allowed me to break down educational attainment, and finally GOD was a variable which probed them on a culturally indicative variable.

First you can see women as a whole have become more well educated. This is a well known dynamic. The absolute change in the proportion of women who have advanced degrees is small, only a few percent, but in the GSS the proportion increase is around 50%. This includes masters and doctorates into one category.

The sample sizes for GOD across the periods of interest are small, but look at the enormous increase in the proportion who have no doubts in the existence of God. There was no change in this result in the general population across this time period.

UPDATE: For the second chart I forgot to note that that’s only women with advanced degrees.