Policy Brief
Flexible work arrangements: a gateway to the labor force for women
Key Results
- Making jobs flexible is important to women, tripling job take-up, from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare, as shown in Figure 2. Flexibility to work from home was very important, as was flexibility to multitask with childcare, but time flexibility made little difference. Forty-eight percent of participants in the sample had at least one child under eight years old.
- Working from home led to women spending 8% more time doing the same amount of work, due to interruptions. This would be cost-neutral for firms that pay piece rate wages, but would be more expensive for firms that pay salaries. However, the ability to work from home increases reliability, decreasing job no-show by 25%.
- Flexible jobs acted as a gateway to outside-the-home jobs for women initially out of the labor force: women who first had an opportunity to work from home were 6% more likely to accept outside-the-home work two to three months later, a result that held when the women were offered either digital or non-digital jobs.