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Remote Work and Women's Labor Supply: The New Gender Division at Home

Isabella Di Filippo, Bruno Escobar, Juan Facal

TL;DR

This paper shows that expanding remote-work opportunities for men, driven by pandemic-era occupational shifts, causally increases wives’ labor-market participation and earnings in households with young children. It builds a simple collective-household model where remote-work expands the feasible set for coordinating market and home production, then validates this via a difference-in-differences design that links occupation-level WFH shocks to wives’ outcomes. Time-use and childcare data reveal that the mechanism operates through intra-household reallocation: wives cut primary childcare, while husbands provide more childcare while working, and daycare usage declines. Robustness checks across datasets (ACS, CPS, SIPP) and multiple specifications support a causal interpretation and highlight the importance of household decision-making in the labor-market consequences of remote work. Overall, the findings suggest that WFH acts as a household-level technology that can dampen gender gaps in labor-force participation and earnings by alleviating caregiving constraints.

Abstract

We study how increases in remote work opportunities for men affect their spouses' labor supply. Exploiting variation in the change in work-from-home (WFH) exposure across occupations before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that increases in husbands' WFH exposure lead to sizable improvements in wives' labor-market outcomes: annual employment rises by roughly 2.5 percentage points (from a 69% pre-treatment mean), earnings increase by about 5%, weekly hours worked rise by roughly half an hour, weeks worked increase by about 1.3%, and the likelihood of part-time work declines by approximately 9%. Evidence from time-use diaries and childcare questionnaires suggests these effects are driven by intra-household reallocation of child-caring time: women are less likely to engage in primary childcare activities, while men working at home partially compensate by covering more for their spouse. These results highlight the role of collective household decision-making in shaping the labor market consequences of remote work.

Remote Work and Women's Labor Supply: The New Gender Division at Home

TL;DR

This paper shows that expanding remote-work opportunities for men, driven by pandemic-era occupational shifts, causally increases wives’ labor-market participation and earnings in households with young children. It builds a simple collective-household model where remote-work expands the feasible set for coordinating market and home production, then validates this via a difference-in-differences design that links occupation-level WFH shocks to wives’ outcomes. Time-use and childcare data reveal that the mechanism operates through intra-household reallocation: wives cut primary childcare, while husbands provide more childcare while working, and daycare usage declines. Robustness checks across datasets (ACS, CPS, SIPP) and multiple specifications support a causal interpretation and highlight the importance of household decision-making in the labor-market consequences of remote work. Overall, the findings suggest that WFH acts as a household-level technology that can dampen gender gaps in labor-force participation and earnings by alleviating caregiving constraints.

Abstract

We study how increases in remote work opportunities for men affect their spouses' labor supply. Exploiting variation in the change in work-from-home (WFH) exposure across occupations before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that increases in husbands' WFH exposure lead to sizable improvements in wives' labor-market outcomes: annual employment rises by roughly 2.5 percentage points (from a 69% pre-treatment mean), earnings increase by about 5%, weekly hours worked rise by roughly half an hour, weeks worked increase by about 1.3%, and the likelihood of part-time work declines by approximately 9%. Evidence from time-use diaries and childcare questionnaires suggests these effects are driven by intra-household reallocation of child-caring time: women are less likely to engage in primary childcare activities, while men working at home partially compensate by covering more for their spouse. These results highlight the role of collective household decision-making in shaping the labor market consequences of remote work.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 48 sections, 13 equations, 15 figures, 42 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Literature
  3. Outline
  4. A Household Model of Remote Work and Labor Supply
  5. Set-up
  6. Labor and childcare supply
  7. Extensions
  8. Labor force participation
  9. Remote work for women
  10. Demand for daycare
  11. Disutility from secondary childcare
  12. Data
  13. Data Sources
  14. American Community Survey (ACS)
  15. WFH Job Postings Data hansen2023remote
  16. ...and 33 more sections

Figures (15)

  • Figure 1: Evolution of WFH by occupation (2 digits).
  • Figure 2: Dynamic Effect of Husbands' WFH Shock on Own Remote Work Uptake
  • Figure 3: Dynamic Effect of Husbands' WFH Shock on Women’s Labor Market Outcomes
  • Figure 4: Dynamic Effect of Husbands' WFH Shock on Women's WFH Uptake and Households' Time-Use
  • Figure A.1: Distribution of WFH Exposure Using Job Postings Data
  • ...and 10 more figures