Does WFH benefit working mothers?

Premium

Harrington, Emma and Matthew Kahn, “Has the Rise of Work-from-Home Reduced the Motherhood Penalty in the Labour Market?”, University of Virginia Working paper, October 2023

A significant number of working women leave the workforce after they become pregnant as they focus their efforts on raising a family. This has traditionally been called the “motherhood penalty” and has been used to explain women’s low labour force participation rate in many countries. The motherhood penalty has also been found to be higher in professions such as finance that are considered to be rigid and unfriendly towards those wanting to focus on their families. In “Has the Rise of Work-from-Home Reduced the Motherhood Penalty in the Labour Market?,” Emma Harrington and Matthew E. Kahn look into whether work-from-home (WFH) arrangements, which make work more flexible for women could help reduce the motherhood penalty by allowing mothers to successfully juggle work and family.

Impact on employers and employees

The researchers studied the impact of WFH arrangements during the 10 years before the pandemic on mothers’ participation in the workforce of different fields. They found that in fields such as finance and marketing, which are unfriendly towards families but where a lot of work can be delivered from home, there was a relative rise in the employment of mothers compared to other women when there was a rise in WFH arrangements. To be precise, a 10% rise in WFH arrangements was found to cause a 0.78 percentage point rise in the employment of mothers in these fields when compared to other women, according to the researchers. Similar positive effects, however, were not observed in other fields such as education and pharmacy, which are considered to be quite family-friendly already and where the physical presence of workers in the workplace is considered to be crucial. WFH arrangements can thus help economies retain more women, and perhaps even men, in the workforce by offering more work flexibility and work-life balance.

WFH arrangements became widely adopted during the pandemic as employers could not get their workers to come to office during lockdowns. And importantly, it also helped many employers save money on rent and other costs of running their business from a traditional office space, thus boosting their financial returns. The concept of co-working spaces became very popular as businesses figured out that they could pay for space based on actual usage rather than investing huge amounts in large offices. But since the end of the pandemic, many employers have increasingly urged their workers to return to office. Some researchers believe that the push by corporate executives to get workers back to office may have little to do with improving the productivity of workers. They argue that it may be the case that bosses simply want to reassert control over workers.