In this commentary, Nancy Folbre, director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Stone Center Affiliated Scholar, discusses the unequal impact of remote work on women.
Mothers have always worked at home, of course. Still, the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States dramatically altered paid work venues, increasing the likelihood that college-educated workers would earn money working from a kitchen table, if not a home office.
This spatial reconfiguration of work is likely to persist, albeit in less extreme form. The consequences for mothers and other caregivers (mostly women) could reduce the gender wage gap, for an obvious reason: commitments to caring for family members often lower productivity in other tasks, invite preemptive discrimination by employers, and substantially reduce lifetime earnings.
Increased opportunities for telecommuting could possibly alleviate this problem, but they could also backfire. Analysis of recent pandemic-oriented household surveys reveals contradictory impacts, highlighting the need for more attention to the temporal and spatial constraints that care responsibilities typically impose.
The external shock of a public health crisis led to rapid adoption of new technologies for remote work that were already widely available but regarded with some apprehension by employers and employees fearful that absence from “the office” would blunt their competitive edge.
Suddenly, the calculus changed — for many college-educated employees outside of health services, not working from home meant being left behind or even losing their jobs. These employees also typically enjoyed both the skill set and the technical infrastructure (access to computers, software, and broadband) required to punch in from home. The very meaning of “face time” was transformed by the proliferation of meetings, classes, and one-to-one conversations on screen rather than in person.
By contrast, many non-college-educated workers — especially Black and Latino workers — either continued to perform jobs that put them at substantial risk of infection or lost their jobs altogether. The distinction between tasks that required physical contact with others and those that did not began to loom large. Researchers began to scramble for ways to define jobs that qualify as “telecommutable” and those that do not.
An interesting, if somewhat approximate definition is developed by Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, and Michèle Tertilt in an April 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper with the tantalizing title “The Impact of Covid-19 on Gender Equality.” Looking backward to data from the Current Population Survey, they estimated that about 28 percent of male workers but only 22 percent of female workers in the United States were employed in highly telecommutable occupations, but that married women were far more likely than men to take advantage of this arrangement — not surprising, given their traditional responsibilities for family care. The authors noted that husbands with greater potential to telecommute than their wives become agents of normative change, since it would be efficient for them to take on more domestic responsibilities.
A follow-up NBER paper, published in April 2021 by an overlapping but slightly different set of co-authors, examines micro-survey data from the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom to explore divergent effects of the pandemic on women’s employment. In general, women were more adversely affected than men, both because of their distribution by occupation and industry and the impact of childcare and school closures.
The strongest finding conforms to commonsense expectations: single mothers were the group most likely to lose their jobs or reduce their hours of employment. In countries with information on telecommuting, the gender gap in labor supply was concentrated among those unable to telecommute (regardless of motherhood status). Continued reliance on telecommuting could potentially reduce the overall gender gap in wages at the top of the occupational distribution.
In both the United States and Canada, the gender gap in pandemic-related employment effects was more than three times larger among less educated workers compared to workers with college education. Black women and Latinas are more likely than other women to lack a college degree and to be single mothers.
Even among the college-educated, telecommuting is no panacea. The April 2021 NBER paper notes suggestive evidence that mothers who telecommute are likely to experience a bigger drag on their productivity than fathers. Dutch mothers working from home are prone to types of multitasking that often involve interruptions from children. Analysis of the number of publications and new working papers produced by academics in the United States also suggests that mothers are more hampered.
More research on the temporal demands of combining paid employment with the supervision and oversight of young children is needed. When does “flexibility” become costly? The answer to this question will clearly depend on the age and specific characteristics of children, as well as the willingness of fathers to become more engaged caregivers.
In the meantime, childcare provisions, regular school schedules, and after-school activities will continue to play a crucial role in shaping the experience of parental employment, even among those able to comfortably telecommute.
About the Author:
Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of the Program on Gender and Care Work, based at the university’s Political Economy Research Institute. Her latest book is The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems.