The Desk Got the Room a Baby Would Need
Andrew Johnston finds that married college graduates in more remote-friendly majors had about 2 percent fewer births a year. The decline showed up in homes with three bedrooms or fewer. In homes with four or more, it did not.
The laptop is on the bed. The room that could take a crib is already in use.
Andrew Johnston, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, looked at the years after offices closed in 2020. He compared college majors people had chosen years earlier, because someone who already wants a child may pick a flexible job.
Nursing, the second-largest major among women, can barely be done from home. Computer science mostly can.
Among married women with a college degree, a step up that scale came with about 2 percent fewer births a year from 2021 through 2024. The step is about the gap between biology and psychology, and psychology is the one you can do from home more often. Full-time work rose 1.3 percent.
Unmarried women showed no clear change in births. Men showed no clear change either. The births are from the American Community Survey, college graduates, 2015 through 2024.
Three bedrooms, then a fourth
The drop sat in the smaller homes. For these married women, that same step meant about 3 percent fewer births in homes with two bedrooms or fewer, and about 3 percent in three-bedroom homes. In homes with four bedrooms or more, the estimate was about zero.
Before 2020, about 11 or 12 of every 100 of these women had a baby in a given year. The change is about four fewer births a year for every 1,000 women.
Johnston also looked at women he counted as already having a spare bedroom. Births fell in that group. Women without a spare room often already had two or more children, so the comparison is tangled up with family size.
The bedroom count fits a desk competing with a child. He says the spare-room check gives that idea less support.
The extra hour was the job
Married men in remote-friendly jobs spent about 41 more minutes a day at home. Married women spent about 24. Most of those extra minutes were paid work.
Housework and time with their children did not rise in a clear way. The men did spend more time with their wives.
They were not more likely to move to a new house or another state. Women in remote-friendly majors did not name a different ideal number of children.
Set the nurses and the teachers aside
Health majors sit at the bottom of Johnston's scale, and the pandemic changed that work directly. Teachers are coded as able to work from home, though most classrooms came back in person.
Take both groups out and the decline in births to married women is about half as large. That smaller number is too uncertain to treat as a real decline, and it still points down. The same numbers leave little room for a rise bigger than about 1 percent.
Johnston's math says a full-time job can explain about half of that decline. That half is a rough share. Among married women with no child at home, full-time work barely moved, and first births still fell.
If working from home fell back to the years before the pandemic, he estimates the total fertility rate would rise by about 0.05 births per woman if only college graduates changed. If other women changed the same way, the estimate is about 0.09. He is scaling a pattern up to the country.
The study stops in 2024, and remote work took off during a pandemic. If the office is in the room a baby would need, say that before you call the laptop the family plan.