The Impact of Return-To-Office Mandates on Working Moms
Episode 451 | Author: Emilie Aries
The growing call to return to the office could have serious impacts on working moms.
We all have our ideal working conditions. Some of us have fully embraced our work-from-home persona, loungewear and all, while others enjoy a couple of in-person days a week, and still others want the comfort of that classic daily commute.
Whatever our personal preferences, the uncanny and baseless decision to force a workforce-wide return to the office by, let’s just say it, male-dominated industries like tech, finance, and engineering, has understandably raised a lot of questions. In this episode, I dig into this growing trend, including the latest data on workplace flexibility and its impact on women’s workforce participation.
Women with children value remote work options
The remote and hybrid work options that came out of the pandemic were a big win for working moms, especially those with young children. The “she-cession” that befell the country when daycares and schools shut down in 2020—which saw women dropping out of the workforce at rates unseen since the 80s—had made a complete turnaround by last year. As of June of 2023, 70% of women with kids under five were in the paid workforce. That beat out pre-pandemic numbers by more than a percentage point.
So the question is: if remote, hybrid, and otherwise flexible work opportunities are so obviously beneficial to a huge proportion of the workforce, and if most industries that went remote during the pandemic have seen record profits in the past few years…why are so many industries pushing for full-on return-to-office mandates that discount the preferences of 68% of working Americans and 78% of working moms?
The dwindling availability of remote work
Combine those high percentages of workers eager for remote or hybrid jobs with decline of job postings with these attributes (a mere 8.4% of jobs posted on Indeed.com in May 2023 offer remote or hybrid work options, as per data from Indeed), and job seekers are in a bind.
While the situation might not be quite as dire as one dramatic Wall Street Journal headline implies - “Return-to-Office Mandates are a Disaster for Working Mothers” there’s no question that competition for these gold nugget jobs is fierce and likely to become more so.
Moms and other caregivers who flooded back into the workforce when flexible options opened up will be first in line for job postings that offer opportunities to pick their kids up after school and bring aging parents to doctor’s appointments.
Where does this leave remote work in 2024 and beyond?
So what does all this mean? Here are my three main takeaways from all this data and the quickly changing winds of the work-from-home climate with which many of us have become accustomed.
Working 9-to-5 never worked for everyone
The pandemic launched remote and hybrid workplace options to the front of the queue, but it’s not as though everything was going splendidly before that. The Monday-to-Friday, 9-5 work week established back in the early 20th century has always been a challenge for folks who don’t have a full-time caregiving partner at home.
With the change in corporate culture we’ve seen over the past few years, workers—definitely women, and many men as well—have discovered the benefits of being able to work hours that work for them, not to mention the perks of finding more fulfilling tasks to replace the 72 minutes per day that the average worker spends commuting.
Homogenous hours = homogenous workforce
Here’s what offering just one option for working hours gets you: one kind of worker. Whatever the shift at a company, if it isn’t variable, that means that, over time, the people who work there won’t be either.
Rather than the workforce diversity that we know yields better bottom-line results, we’ll continue to see those one-size-fits-one office cultures that fly in the face of the hard-won DEI&B initiatives of the past few years.
Systemic inequities underlie the Return to Office debate
I don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the past when there’s so much to discuss and correct right now, but it’s worth mentioning that this issue goes back to the problematic systemic forces behind our capitalist culture.
We can’t talk about the realities and problems of the return-to-office movement without acknowledging the inaccessibility of quality, affordable childcare, the continuing lack of equal pay for equal work, and the gender leadership gap (especially in the very industries leading this questionable charge).
It’s hard to imagine we’d be seeing these same issues in this day and age if there were more women in boardrooms and on decision-making committees who were raising kids or have friends who raised kids. It’s all connected, and it’s all worth raising our voices for.
In this episode, I share a lot of statistics that call into question the decisions and systemic issues behind the recent return-to-office mandates. Now, I want to hear from you. Is your workplace calling everyone back? How are you navigating this big change, especially if you have young kids at home? Visit our Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your experience.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
University of Chicago research
Bankrate article on the effects of return-to-office mandates
Raise your voice!
Take action to advocate for systemic change:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 451. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO, Bossed Up.
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And today I want to talk about what the impact might be on working moms who are navigating this new trend in return to office mandates. Perhaps you've been navigating this yourself personally this year. If so, I really want to hear from you and what this experience has been like for you, because I think this could have, and I'm not alone in this, I think this could have some pretty catastrophic impacts on women's, uh, participation in the workforce, particularly women like me with young children. So let's break it down.
First, I think it's important to acknowledge that in 2020, we saw basically a “she-cession”, as it has been coined, right? This is when women in the workforce dropped out of the paid labor force in alarming numbers with alarming speed, right? In 2020, we plummeted to workforce participation rates for women that we hadn't seen since the 1980s. And this is not surprising, considering a lot of public schools went fully remote, daycare centers completely shut down, right? In the height of this global pandemic, we've been navigating women disproportionately shouldered a lot of the childcare responsibilities, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. You know, women, on average, who are in heterosexual partnerships, earn less than their partner. A lot of single moms didn't have the option, right? Who else was going to stay home if you didn't have a network of care or unpaid network of care? And a lot of folks are navigating this with childcare, which helps the world go around. So when childcare falls apart, your whole life falls apart, your whole career falls apart. And that was disproportionately felt and shouldered by women. And so moms were out of the workforce at alarming rates.
Now, fast forward to 2023, and women's participation rates in the paid labor force have come roaring back. In fact, as of 2023, I know technically we're in 2024, but a lot of the data we have to work on as of now is about six months old. So as of June 2023, it was really women with young children who were at the forefront of women's overall workforce participation coming roaring back. Brookings found that as of June 2023, 70% of women with kids under five were in the paid workforce, which is actually an all time record, because back in 2019, even prior to the pandemic, that number was only 68.9%. So women on the whole, are reaching brand new records when it comes to workforce participation. And the main difference has been that impact has been made by women with young children.
And so when you look at that data, a lot of what people point to as to why this is happening, because it's not like we've had a federal system of quality, affordable childcare implemented, right? It's not like we've had other systemic factors solved for. What folks time and time again point to is the rise and increase in flexible work options, particularly in a very tight labor market where employers were willing to be creative and be flexible in order to get talent in the door.
Now, when you look at the numbers around flexible and remote work that is particularly valued by moms. So while on the whole, the majority of working Americans do support hybrid work schedules, about 68% of them do. And another 64% of working Americans value the option to work from home. It's even more important to working moms. You know, 77% of working moms support hybrid schedules, and 74% of working moms support working from home. So while the vast majority of all working Americans care about those flexible options, that's particularly valued by and it's seen as important by women with children.
And this all comes from a Bankrate study that also found, and as of just about six months ago, when they, when they took this survey in 2023, that 78% of working women with children under 18 are willing to make sacrifices to have access to a hybrid work schedule or working from home. So that might mean, you know, making concessions around pay, making concessions around industry. Like maybe it's, you know, they're accepting jobs they wouldn't otherwise be interested in because they offer the work from home or hybrid schedule. So, economists and social scientists are looking at all of this data and saying, okay, we've seen women come roaring back in the past three to four years into the paid workforce, led by women with young children and led by moms overall, who tend to value flexible and remote work options, even more so than the average American, the average working American who also cares about those things.
So what does it mean for working moms when we start to see in 2024, a growing trend, particularly in very male dominated industries like tech and finance, of moving away from flexible work schedules and calling all of the workers back to the office, full time. And now let me first acknowledge to every woman listening to this right now who's like, I'm a nurse, I'm a doctor, you know, I'm a school teacher. I never had the option, really. You know, there are a lot of folks in our workforce for whom remote work was never an option. And so I don't want to, you know, ignore that fact. But when we see tech companies, when we see engineering companies, when we see finance companies, that have flexed their work schedule options to meet even record profits in the past three years with a flexible workforce, a remote workforce that has helped deliver those results, and they are now calling people back to the office five days a week. That is very troubling to a lot of people, and I'm sure I'm not alone in being concerned, particularly for what that might spell for women with children, moms in the workforce.
To give you a sense of the decline and sort of the impact of the movement away from flexible work, there was some really interesting data that just came out from, Indeed, one of the largest job platforms for job seekers in the world. And this is particularly relevant for my job seeker friends who say, I'm only looking for remote work. I refuse to, you know, open myself up to anything but remote work, to which I always say, okay, you know, that's a very narrow net that you're casting. And this data from Indeed reinforces that they are finding that hybrid work options and remote work openings, job openings with remote or hybrid schedules are dwindling. In an analysis of job postings, they found that the peak for remote and hybrid jobs was in February of 2022. That was when they were the most remote and hybrid job options on their platform available. And at its peak, that only accounted for 10.3% of job postings on Indeed.
So if you're saying, you know, Emilie I just, I can't go back to the office, I refuse, you're already at the peak of workplace flexibility. You were discounting 90% of job openings that were available at the time. That 10.3% of flexible jobs, remote job options, has fallen precipitously to the point where by May of last year, so what is that? Six months, nine months ago, may of 2023, that number fell to just 8.4% of, indeed, job postings. And I would venture to guess, I hope, indeed comes out with more data, because I would be very curious to see what that number looks like in Q1 of 2024. I would be surprised if it didn't go down significantly more.
So, if you are a job seeker, let's say it went down to 5% of jobs on Indeed, if you're a job seeker right now, perhaps one who doesn't have caregiving responsibilities or disabilities that make commuting to the office particularly challenging for you. And you say, look, I just prefer remote work. I'm not going back to the office. Then you are competing along with every working parent out there, every working mom out there, everyone for whom flexible and remote schedules are like a necessity. You're competing for 5% of the share of jobs that are being posted every day. And so I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't go for them because anyone should have that option to compete for those jobs. But those jobs are competitive.
So let that be a takeaway for my job seekers listening. But what's particularly alarming is if we look at all of what I've already in terms of data today, we know that women have come roaring back to the workforce as flexible and hybrid schedules have become a trend. So it's no wonder to me that there are alarmist headlines coming out, like this Washington Post article from last December. So just about four months ago by Joanne Lipman, the title of which is, Return To Office Mandates Are A Disaster For Working Mothers. And I think a little bit of that is hyperbole. I hope it is, at least because her piece opens up by saying how soon we forget at the start of the COVID pandemic, women were pushed out of the workforce at an alarming rate, sparking a full blown she session. There were dire predictions that it would take years to recover from the drop. And then she goes on to say, today, not only has that trend reversed, but women have roared back. And I'm thinking, is this just another hyperbolic panic that feminists are having, or is this, you know, is this going to have a massive negative impact on women, particularly women with caregiving responsibilities, whether that's for aging parents or young children or middle school children or high school children or college age children like, is this going to have the negative impact that people say it could? And I hope the answer is no.
But I think the bottom line takeaways for me in looking at all of this data, I should probably name my bias here. By the way, my bias is that I'm not a big work from home fan, personally, am I a feminist? Yes. Do I believe workplace flexibility is a feminist stance? Absolutely. But when I had a larger team, we were in the office three days a week. You know, I had an office downtown where I mandated my office. My team members returned to work during the height of the pandemic. And so I'm an extrovert. I'm someone who really believes collaboration is easier in person. So, I can, I get it. I just think that the way things are, or the way things used to be, pre 2020, is, frankly, not something to aspire to. The way that work was designed five days a week, nine to five, that really came about with Henry Ford and the Model T. Like, that is an antiquated approach to work anyway, in 2019, much less 2024 and beyond.
And so that system never worked for most women and lots of other marginalized workers who I've already mentioned, like other kinds of caregivers, folks with disabilities, just all kinds of folks for whom we didn't fit into the archetypical ideal worker trope with a full time caregiver at home, making the rest of our worlds go round, right? Anyone who knows the realities of just like, modern dual income, dual earner households, much less dual earner households with children, it's just that was never ideal, that was never that easy to pull off, particularly because there's this one other stat I have to throw at us at the end here. Research has found, as of January 2023, that working from home saved an average of 72 minutes a day for people who no longer had a commute.
So people who have 72 hours more in their day because of working from home, and hybrid work schedules like that has a massive impact. And going back to the way things are is not the intention here is not the goal, because it was never working for, for every part of our workforce. And my second takeaway from all of this is that if you, as a leader, as an executive team, mandate this one size fits all approach to how your workers should work, you're going to have a one size fits all approach to what kind of workers you get. You're going to have a very homogenous workforce as a result. You're going to get a whole bunch of people who are the same as each other. And I don't want to stand on a soapbox again and make the case for the economic merits of diversity in the workforce. But they're real, right? We know that diverse workforces yield better bottom line results. But I think there's a really important moral argument here, too, which is that being a workplace that caters to individuals needs while exchanging the employer's money for the employee's labor, like, that personalization, that individualization, that individualized approach is really what I think flexible work should be all about. It's not saying we all need to work from home full time. It's not saying we all need to work in the office full time. It's saying we need to be accommodating to people's needs, and we need to be understanding that not every worker in our workforce has the same needs. We have to take that equitable, not equality, approach to thinking, um, about giving folks what they need to be successful. And guess what? If you do that, your management team is going to get more from your people, right? You're going to get better results if we give people the tools and the flexibility that they need to be successful.
And so my final point and takeaway on all of this is this whole return to office movement impacts so much more, is so much bigger an issue than any one of our own careers or any one of our own employers decisions. Right? It's not just about how we as individuals are going to navigate this. This all goes back to broader systemic forces, which I've been trying to do a better job on this podcast of acknowledging and speaking about and connecting to what I'm sharing here, right? Like our action hub at bossstep.org/takeaction goes into more detail on some of these big policy initiatives.
But when we talk about returning to the office and how it's going to disproportionately negatively impact women with children, we can't not talk about quality, affordable childcare. If our country cared about quality, affordable access to childcare, these smaller issues, which are still big, but these issues would be mitigated. Working parents lives would already be more plausible, with or without hybrid and remote work options. If we had tackled as a society, as a country, equal pay for equal work in a real way, if we had more women breadwinners, if we had more women who were earning, you know, equal pay for equal work, then we wouldn't have seen so many women make the calculation that they're going to be the ones to stay home to take care of their kids in 2020, because, oh, you know, my husband's salary or my partner's salary is greater than mine. So it makes sense that I'm going to take a backseat, which is a calculation I hear peers of mine and all kinds of people make every single day.
And finally, if we had already solved for the gender leadership gap, I'm looking at finance, I'm looking at tech, I'm looking about these super male dominated industries that are at the forefront of the return to office mandates, right? If we had more women executives in those boards, or on those boards and in those boardrooms making these decisions about how we should structure work here, that's going to impact all of the workers lives who we might not share any modicum of similarities with as senior executives at these companies. If we had more women who knew what it was like to just be a working parent today, or more feminist men who understood the role of men in today's world in helping to shoulder childcare and housework in equal rates than their women partners in heterosexual relationships. Like more women at the helm making these decisions, I have to believe, and you could debate me on this, we could debate on this, but I believe would make us have more equitable and inclusive approaches to how we're making these decisions. So would we even have the return to office mandates that we have today? I don't know.
So, you know, my, it's not this. I don't want to end on too depressing a note, but I just want to remind us that all of this drama that's playing out on the stage of Capitalism is happening on the backdrop of a society, of a country that has yet to meet mothers, working moms in particular, their basic needs like affordable, quality childcare, equal pay, and closing the gender leadership gap. So I hope we can all advocate for flexible work options that work for everyone in our workforce. But in the meantime, this is not a singular fight, right? We have to think systematically.
I'm really curious to hear how this lands with you. How are you experiencing this? Is this coming up in your office? Send me an email at emilie@bossedup.org. And I want to hear your stories about how you may or may not be navigating this yourself. I mean, I know folks who are, you know, got a job in 2021 that was fully remote and they moved to Montana, and now their New York City based company is calling them back to the office. It's like, what do you do in those situations? I really want to hear what this means for you and what I missed. So, as always, let's keep the conversation going. You can always send me an email, but you can always chime in via our Courage Community on Facebook or the Bossed Up group on LinkedIn. And you can get a fully written out version of this podcast today with a
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full transcript and a blog post that's really easy to read and share at bossstep.org/episode451. That's bossedup.org/451. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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