Working 9-to-5(ish): Can remote work help close the labour market gender gaps?

Agnieszka Postepska and Anastasiia Voloshyna

No 1843, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Can remote work help close the gender gap in paid hours? Where a fixed workplace attaches a commute and a block of required presence to every working day, paid hours can be held below the level a worker would choose, and relaxing that constraint should raise hours most where it binds hardest. We examine whether women's paid hours and hourly wages change when they move to firms with greater remote-work intensity, linking Dutch payroll records for 2013-2025 to an enterprise survey recording the share of each firm's employees with remote access to its files or software. Dynamic difference-in-differences estimates compare workers moving from low- to high-intensity firms with workers who change employer but remain in the low-intensity band. A low-to-high move is associated with a 3.3 per cent increase in women's monthly paid hours. The estimate reaches 11.5 per cent among women initially working fewer than 20 hours per week, while women on longer schedules show little change in hours and, in some groups, higher hourly wages. Moves from high- to low-intensity firms are associated with lower paid hours for women. Co-resident partners' payroll outcomes change little. The concentration of the hours increase among short-hours women is consistent with remote work reducing constraints on paid work.

Keywords: remote work; gender gap; working hours; part-time work; linked employer-employee data; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J31 J81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:1843

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