An Update on the Remote Work-Fertility Connection, and Other Interesting New Research
Recess Around The World; America the Land of Feminist Housewives?; No Solo Living for Old Men; Daycare is for Rich Kids (Even in Europe)
Happy Saturday!
Above the paywall, we’ve got an update on one of the first topics I ever covered for The Atlantic. Below the paywall, we’ve got:
Recess Around The World
America the Land of Feminist Housewives?
No Solo Living for Old Men
Daycare is for Rich Kids (Even in Europe)
An Update on the Remote Work-Fertility Connection
If you are on X or subscribe to the New York Times, then you may have already seen some chatter about this working paper that found remote work boosts fertility. Dave Deek also covered it over on his Substack. Unfortunately, I cannot resist the temptation to cover it here as well, because doing so gives me an opportunity to do two of my favorite things: brag and sh*t talk car dependency. Brag, you say? Yes, because I wrote about the link between remote work and fertility for The Atlantic way back in 2021. At the time, no one had directly explored the connection between remote work arrangements and childbearing. But there were signs, as the kids say. Research based in Germany and Russia had found that the expansion of broadband internet led to an increase in fertility among highly educated women. Another study in the U.S. found that internet access boosted labor-force participation among college-educated moms. These findings led some demographers to surmise that the internet was easing the challenge of balancing employment and child rearing for (typically highly educated) women with the ability to work from home.
Since then, researchers have studied the remote-work-fertility link more directly (more on that body of research in a minute). This latest working paper uses data from two surveys (one covering working arrangements in 38 countries, and the other in the U.S.). Long story short: “Both datasets reveal clear evidence that realized fertility, plans for future fertility, and total fertility are greater for respondents who WFH at least one day a week.” In the 38-country data set, researchers found that total fertility was 14% higher (equivalent to about a third of a child) among couples in which both partners WFH at least one day a week than when neither does. In the American data set, they found that fertility is 18% higher (0.45 children per woman) among such couples. “Interpreted causally, our SWAA-based results imply that WFH accounts for 8.1% of U.S. fertility, or about 291,000 births per year as of 2024.”
Now, that’s all very interesting. But because I am who I am, I must point out that some research calls the remote work-fertility connection into question—or at least, complicates it. A 2024 study used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey to explore how access to and use of remote work influenced women’s likelihood of having their first or second child. What they suspected and indeed found is that the impact of remote work on childbearing is context-dependent. Broadly, they didn’t find much of a link between either access to or actual use of remote work and fertility: In fact, childless women with the ability to work from home were actually less likely to become mothers than other women. But they did find an association between remote work and fertility for a specific subset of women: namely, “those who live far from their workplace and thus would have to spend a great deal of time commuting if they worked onsite.”
As you can see in the figure below, women who work from home but who live within 20 minutes of their office are actually less likely to become mothers than their office-based counterparts. But the probability that a woman who regularly works from home becomes a mom rises as travel time to their physical office rises. The impact is more pronounced among women who already have one child (right panel in the figure below). Among those who live near work, moms who work from home aren’t more likely to have a second child than their in-office counterparts. But that changes as distance to work rises: among those who live 45 or more minutes from their workplace, moms who can work from home are more likely to have a second kid than moms who have to be in the office. So, if this analysis is to be believed, remote work boosts fertility only for those women who would otherwise have a long commute. And that makes sense, because, as I covered in my latest for The Atlantic, commutes suck for moms!
