Can remote work attenuate mothers’ mobility constraints in the U.S. labor force?

Key takeaways:

Women face more constraints on their paid labor in the United States than men. One constraint is geographical—for example, women are less likely than men to accept nonlocal employment, a disparity that grows with the presence of children.
A new study finds that remote work can help attenuate these mobility constraints for working mothers and keep them in the labor force, especially in cities with long commute times and high traffic congestion.
The effect of remote work is largely limited to women with higher levels of education, who tend to work in industries in which remote work and other flexible work arrangements are more accessible, offering them opportunities to balance their professional and personal responsibilities.

Overview

Women’s labor force participation increased dramatically over the course of the 20th century in the United States. Indeed, the labor force participation rate of women between the ages of 25 and 54 years old grew from 35 percent in 1948 to 74 percent in 1990. Several factors contributed to this phenomenon, from changes in culture and in women’s expectations regarding their own socioeconomic status to improvements in women’s education and expanded access to contraceptives and abortion. The structural shift in the U.S. economy from manufacturing to services, as well as increases in wage gains from work experience and declining occupational segregation by gender, also contributed to pulling women into the U.S. labor force.

Since the late 1990s, however, women’s labor force participation has plateaued, contributing to a slow-down in the convergence of economic outcomes between men and women. A growing body of literature in economics emphasizes the role of persistent constraints on women’s paid work in determining long-lasting gender differences in employment and wages in the United States.

Men and women, for example, differ in their geographical mobility and in their ability to take jobs that require long commutes. Such differences tend to increase with parenthood, as mothers are more likely than fathers to give up nonlocal employment and to decrease their commute after the birth of a first child. In fact, long commute times have been shown to negatively affect the labor force participation of married women in the United States—and increasingly so when children are present.

In a recent working paper, we expand on the existing literature by documenting and explaining the significant heterogeneity between U.S. mothers with different levels of education in terms of the impact of commuting time on their labor force participation—a phenomenon we refer to as the “congestion child penalty.” We find that college-graduate mothers’ labor force participation rate is not affected by traffic congestion, while long commute times have a large negative effect on the labor force participation rate of mothers with no college education. In fact, we show that even small increases in commuting times of approximately 3.5 minutes per commute decrease the labor force participation rate of non-college-educated mothers by up to 2.6 percentage points.

One potential explanation for the heterogeneity in the congestion child penalty between working mothers with different educational backgrounds is unequal access to remote work. Remote work can enable employees with children to reconcile family responsibilities and paid work without paying the monetary and time costs of commuting. As such, the availability of remote work in jobs typically performed by highly educated workers could shield the labor supply of college-graduate mothers from the negative impact of long commuting times.

At the same time, mobility constraints may be difficult to overcome for non-college-educated mothers, who seldom have access to remote work, especially in geographical areas characterized by long commuting times. Consequently, some of these women may be forced to drop out of the workforce.

We analyze time-use microdata for the United States to provide evidence that access to remote work likely protects the labor force status of highly educated mothers in geographical areas characterized by long commute times. We document that college-graduate women are more likely than women with lower levels of education to be employed in jobs that can be performed remotely. They also work more daily hours from home and are more likely to work fully remotely.

These differences increase in highly congested metropolitan areas, where we find that college-graduate women rely on remote work more intensely. In these areas, college-graduate working women also spend more time per day working while simultaneously providing care to other household members.

These findings suggest that when the time cost of commuting is especially high, remote work may help women with access to this type of flexibility to reconcile their paid work with their housework and caregiving responsibilities. Among working mothers with no college degree—who are more often employed in inflexible jobs—however, reliance on remote work does not change with higher rates of congestion.

Our paper contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the possibility that structural changes in the organization of work, and the shift toward remote work induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, may be beneficial for women’s labor force participation. We also contribute to the literature studying the varied effects of remote work. The availability of remote work has been shown to increase workers’ satisfaction, decrease workers’ quit rates, and foster firms’ ability to hire or retain female workers. Our findings suggest that remote work can indeed alleviate mothers’ mobility constraints and shield them from the time costs of commuting, thus encouraging their labor force participation, especially in highly congested metropolitan areas.

The beneficial effects of remote work, however, may only be experienced by women working in certain industries and in jobs that can be performed remotely—typically employing mostly highly educated workers. To the extent that women with lower levels of education remain disproportionately represented in jobs that require frequent in-person interactions, such as those in the food-service industry or in retail, their labor supply may remain subject to the mobility constraints that long commute times exacerbate, especially for those who take on the lion’s share of caregiving and housework within their families.

—Ilaria D’Angelis is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Keren Horn is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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