Dive Brief:

• Companies that offer family-friendly, work-from-home flexibility reduce the financial and career penalties that a woman with a child faces in “family un-friendly" occupations such as finance and business, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• The work-from-home trend has increased the range of family-friendly occupations, transforming “a set of high-paid, high-growth careers into occupations that are more reconcilable with mothers’ home lives,” the researchers said.
• “This expansion of family-friendly occupations promises to reduce gender inequality in the labor market,” they said.

Dive Insight:

A growing number of companies have gradually scuttled flexible workplace policies created during the pandemic and nudged workers from their homes back to the office.

The average office occupancy rate in the 10 largest U.S. cities rose to 52.3% this month from less than 20% in early 2022, according to swipe data from Kastle Systems.

The back-to-office shift looks likely to persist. Nearly four out five CEOs (79%) believe that employees in roles that have traditionally been done in the office should be back on site by 2027, KPMG said in a report last year on CEO sentiments.

CEOs “increasingly favor a comprehensive return to office, but the need for flexibility still holds,” KPMG said.

Among U.S. employees who can work remotely, 51% work with a hybrid in-office/out-of-office schedule, 21% work in the office and 28% work remotely, Gallup said, citing data from May.

“While the future of work from home remains uncertain, large-scale survey evidence indicates that work from home is stabilizing at over twice the rates of pre-pandemic,” the researchers said in the NBER paper.

U.S. workers assign a high value to remote work. They are willing on average to accept a pay cut of up to 25% to secure a partially or fully remote job rather than in-office work, according to another NBER paper published this year.

The size of the tolerated pay reduction is three to five times the amount measured by previous studies, the researchers found in a study of preferences among technology workers.

“We attribute this discrepancy partly to methodological differences, suggesting that existing methods may understate preferences for remote work,” the researchers said.

The prospect of working from home may prompt young women to set their sights on higher educational and career ambitions, according to the researchers of the recently published NBER paper on the “motherhood penalty.”

“The expectation that women can work from home after becoming mothers may increase young women’s incentives to invest in their education, choose degrees that lead to high-growth careers and invest in firm-specific human capital once working,” they said.

“By delinking women’s career choices from their expected fertility, work from home may allow women to optimize more like men,” they said.

A work-from-home policy also increases the incentive for a business to invest in training women employees because women, after becoming mothers, will be more likely to remain with the company rather than quit work and focus on parenting, according to the researchers.