How Remote Work Can Benefit Working Mothers

Remote working and hybrid working remain at the forefront of every manager’s mind, and the remote working policies adopted in the wake of the pandemic will shape the landscape of the professional world for years to come.

For that reason, I reached out to Eliot Sherman, a professor at London Business School who is the author of one of the rare randomised studies that objectively assesses the impact of remote working (you can read the full study here).

The subjects in Sherman’s study worked at a biotech firm in Cambridge, England. Participants in the study were assigned to one of two groups: members of the first group were encouraged to work from home as frequently as they wished, while the second group continued working from the office as normal. Then the groups switched. Sherman found that the policy was universally praised, but that it had a disproportionately positive impact on working women. I had the opportunity to talk to Sherman about why that was the case, as well as how the results translate to other contexts, and what this all means for the future of work.

What interested you in doing this study in the first place?

The main driver of gender inequality at work—the gender wage gap, the promotion gap, the lack of female CEOs—is caregiving. In large scale survey data, in many cases, men and childless women's earnings are often very similar, if not identical. For example, men and women often make about the same amount when they graduate with their MBA. Then, five years out, women are making a third less and then 10-14 years out, they're making half as much. These salary differences are statistically mediated by lack of work hours, which can be attributed to childcare. We know that caregiving demands are not evenly distributed across men and women. Even in dual-earner couples, women tend to be responsible for school runs and doctor's appointments.

This is not to say that other factors do not negatively impact women at work: there are massive differences in expectations for how men and women should behave, or penalties based on stereotypes. However, parenthood statistically has the most significant negative impact on women’s career progression.

At most organisations, when women return to the workforce following maternity leave and seek accomodations for caring for young children, they are offered options that involve reduced work hours. This limits their visibility in the office, and creates a stigma about working mothers. For that reason, I thought that relaxing the assumption that work always had to be done in the office might disproportionately benefit working mothers.

With this study, I aimed to determine whether a universal opt-in remote working policy would end up looking like a classic reduced hours policy—where women take it and men don’t, thereby creating problems—or if it would be more or less evenly distributed. The results were extremely encouraging: this was a universally popular policy. Everyone—mothers, fathers, non-parents—had some reason for wanting to be at home a couple of days a week. Still, it disproportionately benefited working mothers. This is basically a story about remote working helping to reduce work/family conflict and improve perceived job performance among working mothers—while maintaining appeal to everyone else.

Was it difficult to convince the company to implement this policy for the duration of the study?

The single most recurrent theme from managers was, “how do I know that my employees are going to do their work?” I understood that skepticism. But if you're worried your employees are not going to do work when they're outside the office, how do you know if they're doing work when they're in the office? Regardless of whether they’re doing it at work or at home, people are going to place a certain number of Amazon orders, schedule home repairs and call their kid’s teacher between the hours of 9:00 to 5:00.

Did anything surprise you about the results of the experiment?

I thought the younger workers would be universally against remote working, because it’s harder to build connections when everyone is distributed. But younger workers liked the policy because generally they had long commutes due to living far away from the office as a result of having lower salaries than their more senior colleagues. Young people want to develop their careers and find mentors and peers, but they don't want to wake up at four in the morning every day for a long commute — no one does.

The world has changed since you did this study. What does the future of the office look like to you post-pandemic?

Culturally, many firms had fought the shift to home working tooth and nail. The past year has been a really big, clear demonstration for CEOs that a different way of working is feasible.

Still, through the course of interviews with subjects following the end of the study, literally every single person said “We really liked it. It was great. It helped me in all these ways. But we do not want to work from home five days a week.”

For that reason, I don't think the office is going anywhere. What's changing is the default assumption of where work gets done and what the office is for. Maybe a company doesn't need as much space, and maybe the space they need is constituted in a different way: it’s more about having collaborative areas. Maybe we all just have to accept hot-desking as a necessary evil.

What does that mean for the organisation of work, for how teams collaborate, how careers develop? I don't think anyone really knows the answer to that yet. But I think the important thing is that we're starting to ask the question. For decades, it was just taken for granted that if you took your career seriously, you're in the office every day.

The shift to remote working changes the way you think about the office. For example, right now I'm coming into the office about one day a week. I catch up with colleagues, and although they are substantive conversations, it’s not the kind of conversation that would rise to the threshold of “let me get half an hour in your schedule to book a Zoom meeting.” Previously when I was in the office, if I happened to run into somebody, I would usually think “I can't talk to that person; I need to do my work.” Well, then why was I in the office? I could have been doing that at home.

Law firms are another good example. There is no reason you have to be in the office every single day if you're a lawyer. Sure, if you're doing some really intensive prep work before going to trial, of course. But why should the default expectation be that you have to be in the office when you're writing a brief?

There are these slight, subtle shifts in how we think about the organisation of work. But what we're up against is a hundred years of entrenched thinking about how we do work, what work means, and who the ideal worker is—which is gender asymmetric in terms of the impact. A lot of professional white collar work is designed around what scholars call the ideal worker norm. The ideal worker is somebody who is completely unencumbered by familial demands or any other demands. They can be physically in the office five days a week. If you need them to fly to Hong Kong at the drop of a hat, they can do that. If you have crunch time and you need them to come in on the weekend, they can do that. If the school calls and says “your kid's sick," that's not their problem.

How well do you think these results translate to other contexts?

All of the constraints in Cambridge, England are also relevant in Paris—or any big city in the world. Housing is expensive, so young workers often live very far away from where they work. When they get older and have children, they live far away from where they work because they have to live close to their kids’ schools. The result for many workers is long commutes. That's the universal driver. And that's what makes all of this appealing.

Jon wants to hear from you

Are you facing challenges with remote work, or concerned about how to handle the transition to hybrid work as health conditions return to normal?