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A study of fertility among two-income couples suggests that women who go out to work full or part-time want a more equal balance in responsibilities at home.
They are deterred from having a second child because they say they already carry the triple burden of a job, most of the child care and the majority of the housework.
However, if men share the child care, or do more than a third of the housework, the likelihood of a second child rises by up to 50 per cent.
The study of 2,000 couples, which draws on data from the British Household Panel Survey, was collated by Pia Schober of the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and presented yesterday at the BHPS conference in Essex.
It demonstrates the myth of the "new man", and suggests women feel they have been sold short by the idea that they can have it all - two or more children, a husband and a fulfilling career.
It also demolishes the idea that because two-income families are wealthier, they tend to be bigger.
The BHPS is one of the most authoritative studies of its kind, analysing data on a representative 5,500 households, interviewing more than 10,000 individuals every year.
The research follows a huge rise in the number of women working and a fall in the fertility rate compared to the 1960s. In 1975 there were 15.4 million men in work and only 9.5 million women; the expectation was that married women with children would stay at home, and the man would play the role of breadwinner.
Three decades on, there are still 15.4 million men in work, but the number of women in work has risen to 13.2 million.
Meanwhile women had an average of 1.87 children last year, a rise fuelled by the recent increase in the number of immigrants who have far larger families, and IVF, which often produces twins and enables many women over 40 to have children.
But these increases follow particularly low fertility levels between 2000 and 2002, with a record low of 1.63 in 2001. The fertility rate peaked in 1964 at 2.95 children per woman.
Almost one in five women in their mid-forties in 2005 were childless - twice as many as a generation earlier.
Miss Schober said: "Among dual-earner couples, those with full-time employed mothers and young children bear the largest overall work burden, and more of that workload falls on mothers than fathers."
She said working women were less likely to have more than one child because of "perceived inequality or overload" compared to their husbands.
Her research follows a contentious book by Joshua Coleman, an American psychologist, entitled The Lazy Husband, which said men were good at picking the fun parts of parenthood - outings and games - leaving partners with the "grunt work" - packing lunchboxes and doing the washing and tidying.
By Sarah Womack
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