Michaela Jeffery-Morrison, CEO and cofounder of Ascend Global Media, the company behind Women in Tech World Series.
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The office is back in fashion. Amazon, Meta and even Zoom—synonymous with remote working—have requested that staff spend more time in the office. Elon Musk described a “laptop class” living in “la la land” if they thought they didn’t have to go back to the office. And the Guardian reports that "two-thirds of bosses believe that workers will return to the office five days a week within the next three years."
CNBC declares: "The golden age of remote working may be coming to an end."
What does this all mean? It almost goes without saying that "worker" is an inadequate term to describe the wide variety of people who inhabit the world of work. A single mother renting a small apartment is in a wildly different position from a childless man who owns his own house. So what does this mean for women?
Flexible Work Is Feminist
Erin Grau, writing for Fortune in May this year, suggests that flexible work is inherently aligned with the push for women’s rights and greater gender equality. Study after study proves it. Women with childcare responsibilities are 32% less likely to leave a job if they can work remotely. Eighty-eight percent of women say that hybrid work has had a leveling effect in the workplace. Two-thirds say it has had a positive impact on their career development. And flexible work increases the number of women in leadership roles—which is good for the bottom line and overall employee engagement.
In stark contrast to claims that remote working harms connections between team members, the vast majority of women say that they have in fact experienced a greater sense of belonging from working from home, as well as more psychological safety and fewer microaggressions. And much of this is entirely unexpected: With the structure and distance remote work offers, women have more control.
What Happens Now
The move back to the office doesn’t, however, mean that the professional gains for women in the past few years will be lost. Remote working has given rise to numerous studies, some of them cited above, which highlight how distance working affects the experience of women at work. Subsequently, there’s been greater societal awareness of the pressures that women working in an office full time are under, as well as the disparities—in terms of who in a relationship does the greater share of the housework, for example—that emerge when flexible working is unavailable. Moreover, working women everywhere have a far greater consciousness of their own value, having experienced firsthand how historic ways of working benefit their male peers more than themselves and how they thrive when those ways of working fall away.
It’s also evident that businesses are taking different approaches to remote work, with some asking employees to be in the office one day a week and others, five. Even if they’re all headed in the same direction, as two-thirds of CEOs suggest, there’s time to negotiate the new reality. And I suspect that companies that insist on five days in the office might find that women who have thrived under a flexible approach will set their sights on pastures new. Companies that offer flexible working will therefore have a competitive advantage.
Final Thoughts
It’s important for women and our allies to call attention to how remote working has benefitted women since it came into fashion during the years of the pandemic. As gender equality and DEI become increasingly important, for creating fairer societies and eradicating bias in powerful technologies, working arrangements that serve everyone are essential. Even companies committed to having teams in the office as much as possible should consider how they can create an approach that minimizes its negative effects. And companies less committed should roll out the red carpet to women who want to work remotely.
We may find that plans to end remote working completely are scrapped and something else emerges in its place. But if nothing else, we should take a lesson from the experience of remote work: that change is possible, that change that benefits women is possible and that we shouldn’t be afraid to innovate radically in the workplace and elsewhere if it makes our world fairer.
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