More Women Are Staying Away as Return to Office Mandates Soar. Here’s Why |
There’s a wide range of reactions to strict RTO rules, but new data show these policies may harm some workers more than others.
BY KIT EATON @KITEATON
Photo: Getty Images
Even as more companies wrap up or modify their remote work protocols and call for their employees to return to the office, a gender divide is emerging. This recent finding follows the latest headline-grabbing move by Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, who recently told corporate employees to be in the office four days a week or accept a buyout. While his stated goal is to “build and strengthen our culture,” according to a recent Business Insider report, data show that as other companies try the same maneuver across the U.S., what’s actually happening is that more men have returned to in-office settings than women. Researchers are now concerned about the impact this may have on career advancement opportunities for women in the workforce.
A new Labor Department survey shows the extent of the RTO wave hitting corporate America: In 2023, 34 percent of employed men said they’d spent at least some time working from home, but in 2024 the figure fell to 29 percent, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Things get interesting when examining data concerning working women: For both 2023 and 2024, the percentage who said they’d worked from home stayed constant, at around 36 percent, the Journal notes. The remote work gender gap has been “waxing and waning” in recent years, the Journal said, but the report revealed a background trend where the gap is bigger since the Covid pandemic than before it. The paper quoted Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist specializing in studying remote work, who expressed worries about what this gender gap means for women’s future careers. “If you have workplaces where it’s more likely men go in and women work from home, does that mean some are getting left behind in terms of career progression?” he asked.
Bloom’s own data, based on questioning 5,000 U.S. working-age adults, shows a difference of 3.3 percentage points between male and female work rates (with more women working from home), which has doubled since 2022. Bloom also found that women express a desire to work from home more than men do—the margin has remained at about 5 percentage points over the last five years.
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This makes sense if you remember that the working from home trend really was a boon for women, particularly working mothers. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin explained to the Journal that this is because it benefitted the “woman who thought she’d go on leave when she had her first or second child,” and who can now decide that, ‘Hell no, I can still earn money and work from home.’”
This notion is supported by recent reports about Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, who has made a point of keeping some of the flexible working rules that emerged from the pandemic. Fraser acknowledges that this is a deliberate policy, and says it gives her bank a “competitive advantage” in an industry not known for being friendly to working mothers. Her family-friendly policy may help attract and retain talent in the long term—people who may have balked at rival institutions’ less flexible policies.
No matter how unfair the policies may appear, one side effect of this urge to boost in-office managerial oversight is that more women will be overlooked. Data from KPMG, the Journal points out, say that 86 percent of chief executives surveyed said they planned to actively reward people who came in to work in the office with favorable work and financial considerations. If more women stick with remote or hybrid work regimes, this will impact their in-office visibility, and, per KPMG, their potential for future reward.
This trend also parallels recent research on the rise of AI in the workplace and how the evolving technology is already impacting certain classes of jobs. A U.N. report contends that women are disproportionately represented among entry-level work roles, which some experts think are more at risk of being replaced by AI tools than others. Thus, women may be three times more at risk of AI replacement at work, the U.N. research concludes.
All of this is, of course, playing out against a complex social and political background in which the Trump administration has quashed DEI efforts and even claimed that many efforts to equalize the workplace are “illegal.” In pursuit of this agenda, certain keywords are known to trigger the administration’s ire—and “women” and “equality” are on this list.
What’s your take from this? If your company is considering changing your remote or hybrid work policy, make sure you’re being fair—and not accidentally disempowering a section of your workforce.
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