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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Remote work has opened up a world of opportunities. It means I can write from my couch, with a blanket on my legs and a cat at my feet. It means I can work at my preferred temperature (toast). And so I don’t have to go up three flights to the office lunchroom to find a spoon. Many hoped the remote revolution would bring more to women than better access to cutlery. We now have more evidence, some of which is encouraging. Unfortunately, something smells bad.
Even before the pandemic, remote work may have made it easier for mothers to juggle their various responsibilities. One worksheet analyzes the employment gap between college-educated women with and without children. During the 2010s, it declined for women with degrees in marketing and computer science, industries where teleworking became more common. It moved less among women whose degrees prepared them for work in schools or hospitals, which was more likely to be face-to-face.
Today women in the United States are slightly They are more likely to work remotely than men, although the most obvious gap is how much they hate commuting. That distaste contributes to the gender pay gap, as women will sacrifice a greater proportion of their potential salary to avoid a long commute.
A recent worksheet confirms that this is the case in Germany, but surprisingly also finds the difference between men and women without children. Perhaps women have a particularly intense aversion to the uncertainty associated with traffic jams or the intimacy of experiencing another person’s armpit on public transportation.
The same study suggests that remote work could help close the gap gender pay gap, by reducing that special sacrifice that women make to avoid long trips. But it doesn’t eliminate it completely. Even with the option to work from home five days a week, women would still give up about 18 percent of their salary to reduce their commute time by 45 minutes. Men would give up about 11 percent.
It seems that women save more time by skipping the commute to work. According to data collected by José Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steve Davis of Stanford University, they save about 12 minutes they would otherwise have spent grooming, compared to 5 minutes for men. Women are more likely to report not showering when working from home. Perhaps men sweat more or are more likely to lie.
What do men and women do with their extra time? There is some evidence of shifting balances within the home, although not always in a direction that I personally would like. While men spend a greater proportion of the time saved from commuting on childcare and outdoor exercise, women spend a greater proportion of the time saved on household chores. (Writing this from home, I considered resisting doing laundry in the name of feminism, but ultimately relented.)
Men’s ability to work remotely may be creating opportunities for their partners. Heterosexual couples tend to prioritize the man’s career when choosing a location. But what if men could work wherever they wanted? The Stanford University team estimates that while in 2021 about 1.4 percent of men worked completely remotely and their wives did some work in person, in the first months of this year the proportion was 2 percent. hundred.
The last question is how working from home affects productivity. Going to the office is a good way to network and get help. But another recent worksheetby Natalia Emanuel of the New York Federal Reserve, Emma Harrington of the University of Virginia, and Amanda Pallais of Harvard University, suggests that there are trade-offs, which are more severe for women.
They study feedback given and received by software engineers at an online retail company, comparing them by gender and seniority. And they find that working remotely reduced women’s feedback by about 20 percent more than men, as they felt less comfortable asking follow-up questions. Those who received mentoring early in their careers appeared to benefit later, in the form of salary increases.
The challenge is that in-person work came at a price for productivity. Time spent providing help is time not spent on your own work. And because women distributed feedback disproportionately, the effects on them were stronger. The authors believe that the women simply found it difficult to reject their teammates’ requests for help. It’s hard to find spoons in the office.