By Joanne Lipman
Ms. Lipman is the author of “That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together” and other books.
The Trump administration really wants Americans to have more kids. President Trump, the self-proclaimed “fertilization president,” has called for a new “baby boom.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says communities with big families should get more government funds. The on-again-off-again Trump ally Elon Musk, father of at least 14, has warned that “civilization will disappear” if we don’t get busy.
Panicked by falling fertility rates — which hit a record low of 1.6 children per woman in 2024 — the administration has floated all kinds of ideas to encourage babymaking, from launching $1,000 “Trump accounts” for newborns to soliciting outside proposals, like “motherhood medals” for moms of at least six.
Yet the administration is blind to a proven fix that is right in front of us, one that costs it nothing: hybrid work.
Simply put, working from home juices fertility. About 290,000 extra children a year have been born in the United States since the Covid pandemic fueled more work-from-home opportunities, according to a Stanford University working paper. If both parents move from full time in the office to working at home at least one day a week, they will average about 0.5 extra children, pushing toward the “replacement” level of 2.1, said the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, an author of the study. That’s a result of both opportunity (“You can’t get pregnant by email,” Bloom told me) and availability (less time commuting equals more time for parenting). Bloom called working from home “the most effective fertility-boosting policy out there.”
Other countries have seen a similar boost. Norway’s 2020 lockdown led to “a significant and persistent increase in births nine months later,” according to one study. In Italy, flexible working arrangements led both men and women to report increased desire for more children. A study in Germany concluded that the spread of high-speed internet between 2008 and 2012 increased fertility among highly educated women, because it allowed them to work from home. Both Tokyo and South Korea are exploring flexible work policies to boost fertility rates.
Yet Mr. Trump has set a terrible example on remote work, demanding on Day 1 that federal “employees return to work in person.” Dozens of major companies have followed suit, scaling back or eliminating hybrid and remote options, including Paramount, Dell and TikTok, despite extensive research showing that working from home doesn’t reduce productivity and may in fact boost it, while making employees happier.
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