Work-from-Home as a Lever Against the Motherhood Penalty
Emma Harrington and Matthew Khan recently posted their paper "Has the Rise of Work-from-Home Reduced the Motherhood Penalty in the Labor Market?" as an NBER working paper. I first encountered this paper at the Society of Labor Economics annual meeting in May 2024 and I have been a little obsessed over the idea ever since. The motherhood penalty seems like such an intractable problem. It has been measured in countries that have lots of supports for families like extended parental leave and subsidized childcare like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, as well as those with almost none (ie the US). It exists for women with high incomes and low incomes, for women who make more than their husbands pre-birth and those that make less. Mothers in same-sex couples seem to largely avoid it, but I’m not sure that’s going to work as a broad solution (as appealing as Corinne Low makes it sound). But the rise of work from home was something is happening right in front of us and Harrington and Khan show that it reduces the penalty, and did so even before 2020 when teleworking and remote working skyrocketed.
The main results of the paper are shown in Figure 2: those fields that had the largest increases in the work from home rate had the biggest decreases in the motherhood gap in employment, where the gap is comparing mothers to women without children.
But I think the implications of Figure 4 are even more important. Claudia Goldin has popularized the concept of greedy jobs: high paying jobs that require a lot of hours, and those hours tend to be inflexible and the type of work that can’t have one person substitute for another. They are the jobs that are hard to mix with another greedy activity (ie high reward & many hours): caring for children. Harrington and Khan found that it is exactly these types of job that see the biggest drop in the motherhood penalty. Flexible location makes up for at least some of the inflexibility in time.
I see the effect of work from home/telework/remote work on the motherhood penalty all around me. I’ve watched several friends and colleagues re-engage with work sooner than they would have if they had to be in an office, since they could work in the times their spouse was available or they had other forms of childcare. A friend who might have had to quit during the federal return to office (RTO), since she moved to where her husband got a job when there was remote work, talks about having a reverse motherhood penalty, since she was given a reprieve from RTO while pregnant and taking care of her newborn.
Telework and remote work helps when taking care of older kids too. I can start my day early, then pause to make sure they are up and getting ready for school, which is especially useful when I work East Coast hours while living in California. I could also take a half hour to get them to soccer practice or violin lessons or all of the many other things that require a parent taxi, then finish the workday. Without telework/remote work I either couldn’t do those things, or would have to shorten my work day.
And, having seen this paper, all of the clawing back of locational flexibilities that were introduced during the height of the pandemic looks anti-women, anti-mother, and anti-family. You want bigger families/more babies? You have to solve the work-family conflict and locational flexibilities is a useful tool that is being discarded by the biggest employers, including the federal government. It could also increase the proportion of women that go into high-paying, male-dominated fields, which they get warned away from when they seek out advice, due to work-family conflicts. Women might also have the time and space to participate in parts of the economy that they have had trouble entering, like entrepreneurship, if they have the flexibility that work from home provides.
Harrington and Khan were measuring any work from home, but there are broader implications if remote work, where you do not regularly report to an office (as opposed to telework, where you work some of your hours at home and some in the office), became more prevalent. Trailing spouses, who tend to lose income as their spouse takes a more lucrative or otherwise better job, could potentially keep their previous job. They could live or stay closer to family, which also helps reduce the motherhood penalty, particularly in high childcare cost locations, since family can help with childcare.
Increasing work from home (both in the form of telework and remote work) is a restructuring of the workplace, which is uncomfortable for those whom the current workplace structure suits. But we have done it before, from farm to factory and from factory to office. There are positives and negatives to the move away from offices, but for women with children, it seems that the positives outweigh the negatives. One last result from the Harrington and Khan study. They used a survey that asked which job respondents would prefer, where jobs differed in salary, hours, and ability to work from home. Women strongly preferred the ability to work from home when the hours were long, and were willing to give up salary to get that flexibility in location. That same pattern of higher willingness to pay for WFH in long-hours jobs didn’t exist for the men.
