Fertility rates below population replacement level now characterize a broad swath of post-industrial societies, especially in Southern Europe and East Asia. This article offers a theoretical framework that gives primacy to the role of gender-essentialist norms and institutional variation in labor markets to explain variation in total fertility rates across 24 OECD countries over the past two decades. We demonstrate the variation in gender-role ideologies that characterize post industrial countries and show how these country-level patterns interact with measures of labor market protection and the economic situation of young adult males to influence variation in TFRs. We provide evidence that interaction between gender-role ideologies and labor market institutions that reinforces men's role as breadwinners and women's role as caregivers (what we term gender-essentialist norms) is negatively related to post-industrial fertility.