A new gender gap in remote working?

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Gender Working Group features a presentation by Olga Leshchenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

This study examines how the expansion of remote work during and after the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped gender differences in remote work use across occupational contexts in Europe. Drawing on repeated cross-sectional data from the European Labour Force Survey (2019, 2023), the analysis focuses on employees and self-employed individuals aged 25–54. Occupations are conceptualized using Oesch’s class schema, considering both vertical level (i.e., skill) and horizontal occupational characteristics (i.e., work logic). Linear probability models and Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions were employed to assess how individual and occupational characteristics accounted for gender differences in remote work. Findings showed that across most of the countries studied, the gender gap in remote working reversed from a slight male predominance to a female predominance between 2019 and 2023. The female predominance in 2023 was primarily driven by compositional differences across occupations, shaped by the interaction between vertical and horizontal characteristics. Female predominance in remote work was driven by medium-skilled administrative occupations (such as associate managers and office clerks) and by the rise of remote work among high-skill, female-dominated interpersonal service occupations (e.g., doctors, lawyers, therapists). By contrast, male predominance in remote work persisted or widened, increasing among high-skilled technical experts (such as software engineers). Individual-level socio-demographic characteristics contributed little to explaining gender gaps in remote work. Taken together, the results highlight how vertical and horizontal dimensions of occupational segregation jointly structure access to flexible work, positioning remote work as an emerging axis of gender inequality in the labour market.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.