Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

On the Strait of Hormuz, fertility research, and the millions of dollars bet on artificial wombs that missed the point
Remote work raises fertility among employed, partnered adults.

Davis et al.

(2026) estimate WFH accounts for ~291,000 U.S.

births per year.

Return-to-office is functionally anti-natalist policy beloved by “pronatalists”.

A drop from 42% to 30% WFH among women implies ~100,000 fewer births per year.

WFH delivers more fertility impact than the entire U.S.

early childhood spending apparatus, at zero taxpayer cost.

The loudest “pronatalists” (Musk, Andreessen) spent two years killing workplace flexibility while f unding nearly a billion in elite fertility tech .

The 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis forced Asian governments to mandate remote work for fuel savings, accidentally reviving the arrangement corporate America just buried.

One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside.

Companies are going after hybrid like they did with full WFH regardless
By early 2026, the return-to-office movement had won.

Not gracefully ( Amazon could not even find enough desks for the 350,000 corporate employees it ordered back five days a week ) but decisively.

JPMorgan Chase ended remote work in April 2025 .

Dell , AT&T , TikTok , Truist , and the Washington Post followed with five-day mandates.

Instagram’s Adam Mosseri told staff a five-day office presence was needed for a “winning culture.” Microsoft began requiring Puget Sound employees three days minimum in February 2026.

A KPMG survey found 83 percent of CEOs expected full return to office within three years ; a ResumeBuilder survey reported nearly half of all companies demanded four or more in-office days by 2026, with 28 percent phasing out remote work entirely.

Some companies used the mandates as quiet layoffs, hoping workers who valued flexibility would self-select out rather than commute.

And the workers complied.

By December 2025, only 40 percent of employees said they would quit over a mandatory return-to-office notice , down from 91 percent who said the same in January.

The job market had tightened: 2025 produced just 584,000 total job gains, the weakest outside a recession since 2003.

The leverage belonged to employers, and employers wanted bodies in chairs.

The pandemic experiment was over.

Remote work was being consigned to a brief, strange interlude, a concession to extraordinary circumstances that would not recur.

The implicit premise of every return-to-office memo was clear enough: the exogenous global shock that created mass remote work was a one-time event.

COVID-19 was the exception.

Normalcy was the rule.

In March 2026, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the question answered itself.

These governments did not mandate remote work because they had read a working paper about fertility.

They did it to keep the lights on.

But in doing so, they resurrected the very arrangement that corporate America had just buried, and that a growing body of research now links to higher birth rates.

Here is the core of our argument.

A growing literature (Lu et al.

2025, using U.S.

census data; Wang and Dong 2024, running experiments in Singapore ; Bailey et al.

2023, on the COVID baby bump ; Chong and Noguchi 2024, on Japanese pregnancy odds ) converges on the same finding: remote work raises fertility.

The latest and most comprehensive contribution is Davis, Aksoy, Barrero, Bloom, Cranney, Dolls, and Zarate (2026) , drawing on original survey data from 38 countries and the U.S.

Current Population Survey.

The effect operates on what we call the intensive margin: more children per mother, among people already positioned to have families.

It cannot solve the deeper economic preconditions for family formation.

But the magnitudes are striking, the evidence is no longer tentative, and the policy it identifies is precisely the one that self-described pronatalists just finished destroying.

Davis et al.

(2026) draw on two original surveys.

The Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA) covers 38 countries; its fourth wave, fielded November 2024 to February 2025, includes a new fertility module.

The U.S.

Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) is a monthly survey yielding 89,886 respondents aged 20–45 from 135,949 total usable observations (December 2022 to December 2025).

Both samples are carefully constructed: respondents in the bottom 5 percent of completion times and the 17 percent who fail attention checks are dropped, and the SWAA data are reweighted via raking to match the Current Population Survey on age, sex, education, partner status, region, and employment.

Davis et al.

is not the first study to establish this link.

It is the most comprehensive.

Lu et al.

(2025) find that the COVID WFH shock raised fertility, especially through higher-order births, second and third children, not first.

Wang and Dong (2024) demonstrate a causal effect of flexible work on fertility intentions in a Singaporean experiment.

Chong and Noguchi (2024) report increased pregnancy odds for Japanese women in high-WFH occupations.

Bailey et al.

(2023) show relative birth-rate gains among college-educated American women in 2021, the group that saw the largest WFH expansion.

What Davis et al.

adds is scale (38 countries, 135,000+ U.S.

respondents), household-level analysis capturing partner effects, and a concrete national-level quantification: WFH accounts for an estimated 291,000 U.S.

births per year, 8.1 percent of total fertility, as of 2024.

Since U.S.

WFH rates are now three to four times pre-pandemic levels, this implies roughly 200,000 extra births relative to a no-pandemic-WFH counterfactual.

By comparison, Olivetti and Petrongolo (2017) find that U.S.

government spending on early childhood care and education (0.4 percent of GDP) contributes an estimated 0.08 children per woman.

The WFH contribution is 0.13.

Remote work is delivering more fertility impact than the entire early childhood spending apparatus, at zero cost to taxpayers.

The debate is no longer about whether the relationship exists.

It is about magnitude and mechanisms.

Two margins, two different forces
Before we go further, we need to draw a distinction that much of the fertility debate elides.

Birth rates reflect two things: how many people become parents (the extensive margin) and how many children those parents have (the intensive margin).

These respond to different forces.

Entry into parenthood is overwhelmingly driven by economics: stable employment, a partner with stable employment, a reasonable expectation of affording housing and children.

When commodity shocks or recessions destroy the prospects of young adults, and especially young men, whose earnings remain disproportionately important to household formation decisions across cultures, fewer people form families.

If young men in Bangkok or Karachi cannot find work, they do not marry, and births do not happen.

WFH affects the second margin.

The Davis et al.

results are conditional on age, education, employment status, partner’s employment, and marital status.

The women and men in their regressions overwhelmingly have jobs and partners.

For this population, remote work eases the time and coordination costs of combining employment with child rearing.

It shifts the calculus from two children to three, or from “not yet” to “now.” The Lu et al.

(2025) finding that the COVID WFH shock raised fertility mainly through higher-order births, not first births, reinforces this reading.

Remote work is not making new parents.

It is giving existing parents room for one more child.

This distinction is essential for everything that follows.

Return-to-office as anti-natalist policy that Elon Musk loves
If WFH raises fertility by these magnitudes, the corporate return-to-office wave is, functionally, an anti-fertility policy.

Andy Jassy did not set out to reduce birth rates.

But eliminating remote work for 350,000 employees in prime childbearing years removes a feature that workers value at roughly 5 percent of earnings, that parents value even more, and that is associated with significantly higher realized and planned fertility.

Intentions are beside the point.

The 2026 energy crisis: a cruel and clarifying test
The tragedy is that the crisis simultaneously expands WFH (good for the intensive margin) and contracts the economic foundations of family formation (catastrophic for the extensive margin).

The net effect will be negative.

But the longer-run story may be different.

The oil crisis is temporary.

The WFH habits it creates need not be.

East Asian countries have spent billions on conventional pronatalist policies (cash bonuses, parental leave, childcare subsidies) with limited results.

If crisis-induced remote work practices outlast the crisis, as they did after COVID-19, permanently higher WFH rates and the accompanying fertility gains could follow.

We should not pretend that WFH can solve the fertility crisis in societies where the binding constraint is the economic destruction of young men’s prospects.

If the shock lingers, it will do more damage to birth rates in one year than a decade of WFH expansion could repair.

But on the intensive margin, the gains are real.

Even there, WFH is not a panacea.

Kim et al.

(2024) argue that status-driven competition in child education is a key driver of East Asian fertility collapse: parents locked in a positional arms race over schooling, spending enormous sums and time to secure marginal advantages.

WFH makes it easier to drive a child to tutoring.

It does not make the arms race less exhausting.

Davis et al.

acknowledge that these status externalities “could mute the potential impact of expanded WFH opportunities.” Fair enough.

But status competition suppresses desired family size, while workplace inflexibility suppresses the ability to achieve even a reduced desired family size.

WFH addresses only the latter.

In East Asia, that may mean a lower ceiling on WFH-induced gains than in North America or Europe.

But at TFRs below 1.0 in South Korea, every fraction of a child per woman matters.

I described the pronatalist contradictions above: Musk’s simultaneous championing of birth rates and disparagement of remote work, Andreessen’s planet-is-underpopulated manifesto paired with opposition to housing construction, $800 million in fertility technology from a network that is dismantling the zero-cost workplace policy that outperforms government early childhood spending.

We do not need to redescribe the figures.

We still need to diagnose the analytical failure.

The return-to-office case is that in-person collaboration fosters mentorship, company culture benefits from proximity, young workers gain from office exposure, and there are productivity costs to fully remote work.

The research is shaky on all those points, and company culture is more affected by layoffs.

Let’s take them at their word.

Hybrid arrangements of one or two days a week capture a lot of the fertility upside while preserving the in-person collaboration that return-to-office advocates prize.

Companies are still eliminating hybrid arrangements, let alone remote work.

The deeper problem is the distinction between techno-pronatalism and real world pronatalism.

Techno-pronatalism (IVF, genetic screening, embryo selection, artificial wombs) is expensive, selective, and accessible primarily to elites.

Real world pronatalism (workplace flexibility, affordable family size housing, child bonuses, etc) is (relatively) cheap, universal, and available to everyone.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Emma Waters has noted, Silicon Valley pronatalists “tend to promote, in practice if not in speech, a selective pronatalism: more babies of a certain kind.” The WFH-fertility evidence is emphatically not selective; it operates across education groups, occupations, and countries.

And the pronatalists are not merely failing to support the intensive margin.

They are attacking the extensive margin as well.

Opposition to housing construction raises the cost of family formation.

The use of return-to-office mandates as covert layoffs pushes parents out of employment.

The tightening job market of 2025, to which tech layoffs contributed, made it harder for young adults to establish the economic footing that precedes family formation.

They are undermining the workplace flexibility that raises children per mother while doing nothing to strengthen the economic foundations that determine who becomes a parent.

That is not a contradiction in emphasis.

It is incoherent.

Davis et al.

observe that “for societies faced with undesirably low birth rates, WFH can thus yield societal benefits that go beyond any direct benefits to employees and employers.”
Governments should stop discouraging remote work, especally if they received poor advice from certain “industry leaders”.

The public sector is the obvious starting point: because the government is a large employer across many occupations, its workplace practices set private-sector norms.

For crisis-hit Asian economies, the immediate priority is economic stabilization: protecting employment, containing inflation, keeping young men in the labor force.

No WFH policy substitutes for those preconditions.

But once the crisis recedes, the governments that mandated remote work for fuel conservation should study making some version permanent.

Japan and South Korea have low WFH rates, extremely low fertility, and have exhausted most conventional pronatalist options.

Hybrid work incentives could complement existing policies at minimal fiscal cost; the Davis et al.

estimates imply 31,800 extra births per year in Japan and 10,500 in South Korea if WFH rates reached the U.S./UK/Canada benchmark.

Employers should understand what the evidence implies for talent.

Workers value WFH at roughly 5 percent of earnings; parents value it more.

Firms offering hybrid arrangements will attract and retain workers with stable families and the lower turnover that follows.

Davis et al.

caution that “policy interventions that push for a one-size-fits-all approach to working arrangements are likely to yield unhappier workers and lower productivity.” The goal is expanding options, not mandating remote work universally.

But expanding options is precisely what the return-to-office movement is not doing.

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, the play pretend pronatalist tech executive who tweets about civilizational collapse from declining birth rates is ordering his employees back five days a week.

He has invested millions in artificial wombs and embryo selection.

He has not invested a penny in the workplace flexibility that produces, at no cost to anyone, hundreds of thousands of additional births per year, not by creating new parents, but by giving existing parents room for one more child.