Birth rates in rich countries keep falling, and remote work has often been pitched as part of the solution.

The logic sounds obvious. No commute, more time at home, more control over the day. Surely that makes it easier to start or grow a family?

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds the opposite. Among married college-educated women in the US, more access to remote work after 2020 was followed by slightly fewer births, not more.

College majors showed whose skills suited remote work

The obvious comparison, remote workers versus office workers, is misleading. People who want children might choose flexible jobs, or leave jobs that don’t fit family life. That makes it hard to tell what is cause and what is effect.

Economist Andrew C. Johnston of the University of Texas at Austin used a cleverer measure: what people studied at college.

Your degree was chosen years before the pandemic. But it strongly shapes what kind of work you do. A graduate in finance or computer science is far more likely to end up in a job that can be done from a laptop than a graduate in nursing.

So the study:

  • Used US Census Bureau survey data (the American Community Survey) from 2015 to 2024
  • Covered about 1.9 million college-educated women aged 18–44 and a similar number of men
  • Gave each college major a “teleworkability” score, based on how remote-friendly its graduates’ jobs were before the pandemic
  • Compared how births changed after 2020 for graduates with more versus less remote-friendly majors

Married women in remote-friendly fields had slightly fewer babies

For married women, the result ran against expectations.

  • One standard deviation more teleworkability cut annual births by about 0.22 percentage points. That is roughly 2% of the usual birth rate for this group.
  • The same women became 1.3% more likely to work full-time, and their wage income rose about 2.6%.
  • Men and unmarried women showed no significant change in births.
  • Marriage and divorce rates didn’t change either.

The effect is modest. But it points in the opposite direction from the popular hope.

Several checks make the finding more convincing:

  • No pre-existing trend. Before 2020, births for more and less remote-friendly majors moved in parallel.
  • A built-in placebo. Births in 2020 itself showed no effect. That makes sense, since most babies born that year were conceived before the pandemic.

About half of the drop came from more paid work

The paper’s main explanation is simple: remote work made it easier for women to do more paid work.

Without a commute, and with more control over their schedules, married women in remote-friendly fields became more likely to work full-time. An accounting exercise in the paper attributes about half of the drop in births to that extra employment.

It’s a classic economic trade-off. Time and energy are limited. When work becomes more convenient, more of both can flow into a career. Flexibility doesn’t automatically go toward having children.

The study also looked at other explanations:

  • Changing preferences? Survey data showed no change in how many children Americans say is ideal.
  • Not enough space? Births fell among women in homes with three or fewer bedrooms, but not in larger homes. A home office may compete with a nursery. The author treats this as only partial support.
  • More help at home? Men spent about 40 more minutes a day at home, but there was no significant rise in their childcare time.

Flexibility is not the same as time for family

The finding challenges a common assumption in debates about falling birth rates: that the main obstacle is logistics.

If commutes and rigid schedules were what stopped people from having children, removing them should have helped. Instead, much of the freed-up flexibility went to work.

That suggests family decisions are driven by deeper forces: career ambitions, income, housing, and the persistent pull of paid work on women’s time. Making work more convenient doesn’t change those trade-offs. It may even sharpen them.

It also helps explain why earlier research looked more optimistic. Previous studies found that remote workers report wanting or having more children. But those comparisons can’t separate the effect of remote work from the type of person who chooses it. Johnston’s design is built to avoid exactly that problem.

What the study doesn’t show

This is a working paper and has not yet been peer reviewed.

Important limits:

  • One key group drives much of the result. When health-related majors are removed, the effect on married women’s births roughly halves and is no longer statistically significant. Removing education majors makes little difference.
  • It covers only four years after 2020. It shows the timing of births, not whether women will end up with fewer children over their lifetimes.
  • It’s about college graduates. Extending it to all women requires strong assumptions.
  • It doesn’t capture hybrid work well. The survey only counts people who mainly worked from home in a given week. The author notes this probably overstates the effect per remote worker.
  • It happened during a pandemic. Remote work adopted in normal times could have different effects.
  • The paper projects that a return to pre-pandemic telework would raise lifetime births by about 0.05 to 0.09 per woman. That is an extrapolation, not a measured result.

Remote work alone is unlikely to raise birth rates

This is mainly a policy and workplace story.

For governments hoping flexible work will reverse falling birth rates, the reasonable inference is caution. Remote work alone is unlikely to do the job, and it may pull slightly the other way.

For employers, it’s a reminder that flexibility can boost women’s employment and earnings. That is a real benefit, but a different one from what some advocates promised.

Flexibility doesn’t decide how people use it

Falling birth rates are reshaping economies, pension systems and politics across the developed world. Policymakers are searching for levers that work.

This study suggests one popular candidate doesn’t, at least not on its own. When work became easier to fit into life, many women chose more work.

Giving people more flexibility doesn’t decide what they do with it.