The future of office life is not female — or so new data suggests. Survey results published Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show men are returning to in-person work at a faster clip than women, with just 28% working partially or fully from home in 2022. That’s a sizable drop from 2021, when some 35% of men worked from home at least some of the time. In contrast, the share of women working remotely barely changed between 2021 and 2022, falling from 41.5% to 41%. Because women tend to carry out more housework and childcare duties, analysts expect the disparity to persist — and potentially worsen the gender pay gap.
- Education is a factor. Only one in five high school graduates worked virtually in 2021, compared to two-thirds of college-educated workers. “Women more often have higher degrees, which allow for jobs that are more likely to be remote,” writes The Washington Post.
- So are housework and childcare. In households with children under age 6, women spent 1.1 hours and men spent 31 minutes per day providing physical care to kids. Forty-seven percent of women and 22% of men say they do daily housework.
By Melissa Cantor, Editor at LinkedIn News
Remote work appears to be here to stay, especially for women
More than one-third of American workers are still doing their jobs at home, according to new data from a major government survey
Working from home “is a permanent shift,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “We’re now seeing many companies start as remote-first companies.” The new data is a “continuation of what we’ve been seeing” in the American workforce, she said.
In 2022, 34 percent of workers over age 15 reported working at home vs. 69 percent in the workplace, dipping slightly from the previous year. The total share exceeds 100 percent because some workers surveyed worked from both home and in their workplace in one day. Employees spent an average of 5.4 hours per day working at home.
The pandemic spike in working from home was limited to college-educated workers, especially those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, about 54 percent of whom worked at home in 2022.
Results from 2019 through 2021 showed that the pandemic dramatically shifted how much time people spend working at home. The new data suggests those changes persisted through 2022, even as much of life returned to normal as more people got vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus, and case counts fell.
At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the proportion of employed Americans who worked at home increased from 24 to 42 percent, compared with 2019. The average number of hours spent working at home also jumped, from 3.3 hours per day to nearly 5.8 hours per day, according to ATUS data from May through December of 2019 vs. 2020 (the survey was suspended for the early months of 2020).
The following year, the number of at-home workers dipped only slightly, with the share of at-home workers holding steady at about 38 percent of all workers.
The dramatic shift toward at-home work is most pronounced in the female workforce. Pre-pandemic, 26.2 percent of women worked from home in 2019, which increased to 49.3 percent in 2020 and dipped to 41 percent last year.
In 2020, female workers also were much more likely than male workers to work from home, and since 2021, that gap has widened. Last year, 41 percent of female workers spent time working at home compared with 28 percent of male workers.
Women are more likely to prefer to work from home, as compared with men, surveys of the American workforce show, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.
The perceived gender gap in remote work is partly because of those personal differences, but it also reflects the different jobs men and women occupy, she said. Women more often have higher degrees, which allow for jobs that are more likely to be remote.
“The gender differences are small compared to the educational differences,” Stevenson said. She said she spoke to a few autoworkers Wednesday, who said it’s impossible for them to work from home. “You can’t build a car at your house,” she said.
For those with a high school degree or less, the share of at-home workers has been consistently low — fewer than 1 in 5 employees with high school degrees worked at home in 2021, a trend that continued in 2022. Workers without a high school diploma were even less likely to work from home in 2022 than they were before the pandemic.
