How working from home has affected working mothers

For many years, being a working mother meant dealing with the conflict of being expected to be at work and at the school pickup line simultaneously, Goldberg reports.

But remote work has helped to ease that burden, according to research from the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California.

In their study, researchers looked at fields like computer science, marketing, and communications, which allowed remote work from 2009 to 2019. They found that, when remote work rose 2%, there was a 2% increase in mothers' employment. However, there was still a gap between employment rates of mothers and those without children, but remote work helped close that gap.

Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, has found that women typically seek jobs with more flexibility so they can manage household responsibilities — a factor that has contributed to the gender pay gap.

While remote work can be helpful to some working women, they can also see greater penalties when they do work from home, Goldberg reports. One study of engineers at a Fortune 500 company found that remote work had a negative effect on the feedback junior employees received from their work, and that penalties were more pronounced for women.

"Proximity has a bigger impact on women's comfort with asking follow-up questions," said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia, who worked on the remote work feedback study as well as the mothers' workforce participation study. Men, however, seemed more comfortable asking questions even if they weren't physically near their colleagues.

How remote work has affected productivity

Research on whether working remotely makes someone more productive has ranged significantly. One 2013 paper from Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, and colleagues looked at a call center in China that allowed some employees to work remotely for nine months and found that productivity increased 13%.

Around 10% of that increase was attributed to employees taking fewer breaks, while 4% was attributed to them doing more calls per minute since their working environment was quieter.

However, one study of an Asian information technology company's remote workers during the pandemic found productivity declined between 8 and 19%. Another study that looked at an American call center found that remote workers made 12% fewer calls.

But a different study of the productivity of economic researchers in the United States during the pandemic found a nearly 24% increase in their output.

According to Bloom, the various studies show that productivity of remote workers varies based on an employer's approach, how well-trained managers are to support remote employees, and how often employees can occasionally meet up with each other.

"It all comes down to how workers are managed," Bloom said. "If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn't seem to work is sending people home with no face-time at all." (Goldberg, New York Times, 10/10)

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