Remote work can be ‘a protective shield’ against gender discrimination

Having staff physically in the workplace benefits companies and employees through stronger team collaboration and informal mentorship.

But as organizations continue to corral employees back into the office, they should recognize that women pay a price through increased exposure to gender discrimination, says a new study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

In a survey of more than 1,000 professional women in hybrid jobs, Laura Doering, an associate professor of strategic management, and András Tilcsik, a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Strategy, Organizations, and Society, found that the workers nearly always experienced less gender discrimination in their everyday interactions when they were working remotely compared to in person.

Those differences were substantial. Some 31% reported gender discrimination when physically in their workplace, compared to 17% when working remotely. When the researchers ran their own statistical probability analyses based on the survey results, the gap was starker for women who worked only or mostly with men. There, the likelihood of experiencing gender discrimination while on-site was 58%, compared to 26% when working remotely.

Younger women under age 30 were also likelier to experience gender discrimination on-site—31% compared to 26% for older women—with only 14% of younger women likely to experience it while working remotely.

“It’s rare to uncover a finding that applies so consistently across so many people working under so many different conditions,” said Prof. Doering, an associate professor of strategic management. “It didn’t matter how we sliced the data.”

Female workers aged 18 to 75 were asked to report their perceptions of how they were treated at work based on 11 different forms of gender-based slights and offenses. These included inappropriate attention, having their ideas ignored or stolen, being assigned tasks unrelated to their job, being excluded by co-workers and being addressed with a sexist name during a meeting.

Given the consistency of results, the researchers concluded that remote work effectively served as a “protective shield” and “a refuge” against gender discrimination for many women.

“Our findings suggest that the higher incidence of everyday gender discrimination on-site could erode women’s job satisfaction and increase burnout,” said Prof. Doering. “Over time, this could make it harder to retain talented employees and could negatively affect team performance.”

Nevertheless, the findings should not suggest that remote work is the ultimate solution to gender discrimination, said Prof. Doering, although they do show the importance of retaining remote work options while leaders try to eliminate workplace bias.

“It’s important to consider why women would be experiencing gender discrimination in the first place,” she said. “I would encourage managers who learn about this research to do the hard work of addressing gender discrimination rather than pushing women into remote roles as a way of trying to get around the issue.”

The study appears in Organizational Science.