How can men still be telling women who don’t want kids they ‘just haven’t found the right guy’?

I’m the first person to admit I don’t always have my finger on the cultural pulse, despite working in a newsroom. When I admitted to the music editor after the Grammys that, gun to my head, I couldn’t name a single Bad Bunny song, her look of mingled disappointment and disgust was enough to make me scuttle off in shame. And yet even I somehow know that the global music star Charli XCX married The 1975’s drummer, George Daniel, last summer, in two incredibly stylish weddings – one of which featured skinny-dipping and a cigarette platter.

The Arrested Development and Ozark actor Jason Bateman, however, must have missed the memo. The ‘BRAT’ artist was appearing on SmartLess, the podcast that Bateman co-hosts with fellow actors Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, when an excruciating interchange took place. Bateman, who has two children with his wife, Amanda Anka, asked Charli about her child-rearing preferences, the presumption being that she must be champing at the bit to start a family. “I actually don’t really want to have kids,” came her answer.

“You don’t? Wait, why?” said Bateman, aghast. And then, the real clanger: “I mean, I guess I’m backing into giving myself a half-assed compliment here, but my wife did not want to have kids. Once we started going out, she was like, ‘OK, I think I can have a kid with this guy.’ So, you might find somebody.”

Cue Charli having to awkwardly inform him that she was, in fact, already married.

I’d like to say I was surprised by this tone-deaf exchange. But Bateman’s knee-jerk response of, essentially, “You just haven’t met the right guy yet!” when presented with a grown woman declaring that she’d rather stay child-free, remains frustratingly predictable. As far as we think we’ve come in normalising women’s life choices, a loophole seems to linger when it comes to the motherhood question. Despite plentiful evidence to the contrary, not least the immediate take-up of contraception as soon as it became widely available, the default assumption is still that all women want to have kids and that, once they hit 30, the whole lot are baby mad until proven otherwise.

It can be difficult to explain to people, let alone wider society, that you’ve weighed up the pros and cons and concluded that children might not be for you. It’s often easier to say nothing at all. Female opinions on the matter aren’t respected or taken seriously, in part because Western society remains founded on the unpaid and unseen labour of women. It is another sphere in which a “society knows best” attitude remains entrenched. You need only glance across the pond at America’s roll-back of abortion rights to see just how dangerous that can be when applied to women’s bodies.

This might not be so intolerable were men subject to the same spiel. But I’ve never heard anyone say something similar – “you just haven’t met the right woman yet!” – to a man who professed not to want kids. We inherently trust men more when it comes to knowing their own minds, and, lest we forget, men have historically had very little to do with raising their own children. That was women’s work! The underlying message persists that men are fine as they are, but women are less-than until they accomplish their purpose: to create and raise new members of society.

Perhaps the worst thing about casting doubt on women’s reproductive choices is that we back them into a corner. The decision to have a family is complex, nuanced and emotionally charged – and subject to change depending on the circumstances.

I spent much of my thirties convinced that I had no desire to become a parent. My biological clock was silent; my friends with offspring all looked perpetually knackered. And then, bam! I hit 38, and something shifted inside me; I could finally see that maybe, just maybe, I might want to pursue this possible future I thought I’d ruled out.

We need to allow women the freedom to express their current preferences, yet we also need to allow them to reserve the right to change their minds. Forcing us to double down simply to combat the assumptions that come from those who really don’t know best, actually, makes it difficult to have safe, sensitive conversations around fertility that enable women to explore how we truly feel. At a point when birth rates are declining around the world, surely this kind of open, judgment-free dialogue is more vital than ever?

It’s about time we stopped telling women what they want – and finally started listening instead.