How family-friendly workplaces shape fertility intentions

In a country where the birth rate has collapsed to 1.18 children per woman, among the lowest figures ever recorded anywhere in the world, demographers have been searching for levers that might actually move fertility intentions. A new study suggests one surprising candidate may be sitting inside the workplace rather than in government budgets: the flexibility of an employee’s working hours. Research published in the journal Genus by Maida Juni of the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Agnese Vitali of the University of Trento shows that Italian employees with access to flexible working arrangements are significantly more likely to say they intend to have a child in the near future, while on-site childcare services and other corporate benefits show no statistically significant effect at all.

The findings draw on the 2016 Family and Social Subjects Survey, one of the most complete nationally representative datasets collected by the Italian National Statistical Institute, covering 3,679 women and 4,034 men aged 18 to 49. The dependent variable was deliberately simple: respondents were asked whether they intended to have a child, or another child, within the next three years, a measure that prior fertility research has validated as a reasonable proxy for actual reproductive behavior. Answers of “certainly yes” and “probably yes” were combined into a positive intention category, and the researchers used binary logistic regression models, estimating average marginal effects, to isolate the association between workplace characteristics and fertility intentions while controlling for age, education, partnership status, number of children, economic sector, region of residence, and place of birth.

The results split cleanly along the type of benefit on offer. For women, mothers of one child who worked in jobs with flexible schedules were six percentage points more likely to intend having another child compared with mothers in rigid jobs, a statistically significant difference. For men, the pattern appeared at a different point in the family life course: childless men with flexible working arrangements were five percentage points more likely to intend a first child than childless men without such flexibility. In both cases the reference category was employment as an employee with non-flexible hours, and the associations survived the full battery of controls. Intriguingly, when the researchers broke the flexibility effect down by employment sector, the positive association was driven entirely by the public sector; no significant relationship emerged among private or mixed-ownership employees.

By contrast, workplace-based childcare produced no significant results. Respondents whose employers provided a nursery or kindergarten, or who reimbursed part or all of the associated costs, were no more likely to intend a child than employees without any such benefit, whether they were men or women, parents or childless. The researchers caution that this null finding could partly reflect sample size: fewer than two percent of respondents, just 124 employees, had access to employer-funded childcare at all, so the analysis may simply lack the statistical power to detect a modest effect. But they also point to a subtler possibility: having access to a benefit on paper does not guarantee that employees can actually use it, particularly in organizational cultures shaped by “ideal worker” norms that discourage taking advantage of family-friendly provisions.

Italy makes an unusually telling laboratory for this question. Publicly subsidized early childhood education for children aged zero to three covers only about thirty percent of resident children, one of the lowest enrollment rates in Europe, and 68 percent of public nurseries report waiting lists. As a result, grandparental childcare has become a structural pillar of the system, with roughly 60 percent of grandparents providing regular care for grandchildren under five when both parents work. Women bear 74 percent of the unpaid care burden, spending five hours a day on unpaid work compared with 1.8 hours for men, and one in five Italian mothers quits employment after childbirth. In 2022, voluntary resignations among parents of children under three rose by 17 percent, with nearly three-quarters of those resignations submitted by mothers. Against this backdrop, the researchers hypothesized that workplace provisions, which bypass the slow machinery of public welfare reform, might be especially consequential for fertility decisions.

The theoretical framing draws on two classic strands of demography. Becker’s economic model treats the opportunity costs of childbearing, in both money and time, as central to reproductive decisions; family-friendly policies lower those costs by easing time constraints and financial pressure. Gender-equity theories, notably McDonald’s account of institutional inconsistency, predict low fertility where women enjoy high equity in market-oriented institutions such as employment but face entrenched inequity in family-oriented institutions. Italy fits this profile closely: mothers remain the primary caregivers, the male-breadwinner model persists, and the tension between employment and motherhood pushes women to delay or forgo children. The authors also anticipated that workplace policies would matter more for parents of one child than for the childless, because parents have firsthand knowledge of the logistical and financial costs that such policies are designed to defuse, and this expectation held for women but not entirely for men.

The gendered pattern in the results surprised the researchers. Previous studies from South Korea and the United Kingdom had found no clear link between access to flexible work and fertility intentions, and the Italian study’s expectation was that women’s intentions, burdened as they are by the realities of childcare, would be the more responsive of the two. Instead, childless men emerged as sensitive to both flexibility and broader corporate benefits. In the third model, which tested whether access to at least one workplace benefit from a list including childcare, medical care, health insurance, education subsidies, accommodation, summer stays, and subsidized loans, childless men with any such benefit were five percentage points more likely to intend a first child, a significant result. The authors offer two readings. In a gender-conservative context where men are typically the main breadwinners, monetary benefits may reduce the perceived financial burden of fatherhood. Alternatively, self-selection may be at work: people planning families may deliberately seek out family-friendly employers, a mechanism that may operate especially among women who expect to assume primary parental roles after childbirth.

The control variables told a familiar story about precarity. Temporary employment was associated with lower fertility intentions, reinforcing a robust Italian literature linking job instability to postponed or foregone childbearing. Intentions rose through the late twenties and thirties and declined afterward, were higher among partnered and cohabiting respondents, and were higher in the Center, South, and Islands of Italy than in the North. Being born abroad was positively associated with fertility intentions among men, while educational attainment and economic sector showed no net association once other factors were accounted for. Self-employed mothers were less inclined to intend a second child, and childless women in temporary jobs were less likely to intend a first one, underscoring that reproductive plans remain tightly bound to economic and employment circumstances.

The policy implications arrive at a politically charged moment. Italy’s Ministry of the Family, Birth Rate and Equal Opportunities introduced a code of self-regulation in 2023, inviting companies on a voluntary basis to support maternity through measures including extended parental leave, flexible entry and exit times, part-time transitions, remote working, and workplace nurseries. The new evidence suggests that the flexibility components of such schemes are the ones most likely to pay off demographically, while the more capital-intensive childcare provisions may need to reach far more employees before they register an effect. The authors also argue for a gender-neutral approach: workplace policies have traditionally targeted mothers in Italy, but the findings indicate that fathers’ working arrangements shape fertility plans as well, echoing broader research on the rise of “engaged fathers” among younger generations.

The study comes with caveats that the authors are candid about. The data are cross-sectional, so no causal claims are possible, and reverse causality, family-planners self-selecting into flexible jobs, cannot be ruled out. The survey predates the COVID-19 pandemic, after which flexible and remote working became dramatically more widespread, potentially changing the meaning of “flexibility” itself. The data also lack information on partners’ workplace conditions and on parental leave schemes, preventing the couple-level analysis that much of the fertility literature now regards as essential. Still, the core message stands out clearly in one of Europe’s lowest-fertility, lowest-childcare-coverage settings: when it comes to whether Italians say they want children, the ability to bend the workday around family life appears to matter, while the presence of a nursery down the hall, at least at current levels of provision, does not.