In 1989, legal scholar Joan Williams published a theory explaining why professional women give up their careers.

Professional jobs, she writes, require total availability, frequent travel, long hours and being in the office even if a child is sick or has just been born. In short, you have to be a man married to a housewife.

“Employers expect this,” Ms. Williams writes. But mothers, who are also expected to take care of the family, “cannot meet this career profile”, even with good daycare.

For fairness of opportunity and to get the most out of the workforce, we must redefine the criteria of what a good worker is.

Over the past 30 years, Ms. Williams has noticed that it is less and less necessary to work face-to-face in the office. Files have left filing cabinets and phones have gone mobile, but the “ideal worker” she defined in 1989 is unchanged. Technologies enabling flexibility emerged, but using them was seen as a lack of dedication.

“It was so frustrating that I left the study of work and family,” says Ms. Williams, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then the pandemic hit. The confinement forced companies to adopt teleworking, which continues. Ms. Williams has regained hope: today, the ideal employee in the professional sphere is often someone who does not go to the office every day, she explains.

Mothers, in particular, have undoubtedly gained a lot from the change. Some economists believe that teleworking contributes to women’s labor force participation rates, which have never been higher. The progress of mothers of young children has been particularly significant, even more so for those with a baccalaureate.

After all, even in couples where salaries are roughly equal, women take on more household and family responsibilities. And when work and family come into conflict, it is most often women who take time off. The work of Claudia Goldin – 2023 Nobel Prize winner in economics – has shown that in law and finance, for example, those who work long, inflexible hours are better paid, which contributes to the gender pay gap.

Today, many of these demanding jobs are more flexible. Business travel is down and many people are leaving the office at 6 p.m., not just parents picking up the little ones – which Dad would like to do too.

There has been a lot of debate about the permanence (or not) of teleworking. It’s probably permanent at least in part: about 70% of workers who can still work from home, either every day or some days. Since 1988, the Conference Board has measured job satisfaction: it has never been higher and it is highest among workers in hybrid mode.

But if the old attitudes return (“it’s for lazy people”; “not for leaders”; “a privilege for the lazy” for those who don’t “work as hard”), the generalization of the hybrid option will not won’t make a big difference. Ultimately, Ms. Williams said, they might “just strengthen the invisible staircase for white men.”

From an economic point of view, it is good to keep mothers in the workforce. “In an economy where there is an abundance of female labor, it is easier to hire and that is good for all businesses,” says Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. This is especially true for high-skilled jobs, as the majority of college graduates are women.

Regardless of the economy, it pays to retain mothers, and that’s why some U.S. companies offer expanded maternity benefits, although they aren’t required to. “They realized it was cheaper than losing an employee and having to replace her,” says Stevenson.

According to studies, mothers, fathers and people without family responsibilities are less likely to quit their jobs and report a better work-life balance when they have more control over the workplace and their schedule. There’s no consensus on whether working from home or in the office is more productive, but most experts say it depends on the task.

But what matters is “who really needs the flexibility to not quit their job,” emphasizes Lauren Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an analysis of the unprecedented proportion of mothers of young children who are working.

This high employment rate among women does not seem – as employers might fear – to indicate that mothers are trying to work while caring for their young children. Only 6% of mothers of young children who telework at least once a week report not having access to child care, according to a Brookings Institution analysis by Bauer and Molly Kinder using U.S. Census Bureau databases. United.

Some working mothers, like Daphne Alsiyao, an employee of a non-profit promoting early childhood education, say that working remotely allows them to manage their schedules around daycare hours.

Daphne Alsiyao usually works from home until 3:30 p.m., when she picks up her three children. She works on it until bedtime, then turns her computer back on to finish her work. What would she do if she couldn’t organize herself like this? “I really don’t know,” she said.

After a recent move, she put her youngest on the waiting list of five daycares, to no avail.

Leaving the office on time to pick up the children or saving yourself the commute by working from home for a few days was possible in many jobs before the pandemic. But there was a certain stigma in the office. Many of the women interviewed for this article spoke of “guilt.” Taking advantage of flexibility at work makes you seen as a less reliable colleague, which hurts advancement.

Kellie Samson, a mother of two, works in communications at a private university and only comes into the office one day a week. She explains that after the pandemic, “people realized what we’ve always known: we can get the job done, but maybe not in the traditional sense.”

Before the pandemic, women were more likely to opt for flexible working, even if it came at a cost to their careers. People of color report preferring to work from home at higher rates than their white counterparts. If spending more time in the office means being considered a hard worker or getting better jobs, most experts make the same assumption about who will show up.

“In principle, flexibility could be used to improve gender equality,” says Matthias Doepke, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2020, he co-authored a paper showing that men who can work remotely and are married to women who cannot do so provide about 50% more child care than men who cannot telework. “Maybe, then, it’s women who benefit from this flexibility,” he says.

In this case, full or partial teleworking could become a new version of mothers’ professional ceiling.

“Hybrid working will make it easier for women to stay in the workforce, but it will be harder for them to get promoted,” Williams says.

So, is it better for women or not? “The result could be an enclave of women who work from home more than most men,” Goldin says. But the question is whether it is worse than seeing the same women working part-time. » The risk of being seen as less trustworthy “doesn’t mean it’s not an improvement, on net.”

Teleworking is not a panacea. Most jobs are not compatible with teleworking. In the United States, only 25% of private sector employees have access to paid family leave, and nearly half of Americans live in a “daycare desert” where supply does not meet demand, according to the Center for American Progress.

By accident, the pandemic has made work-life balance more acceptable in certain industries. It is too early to measure its long-term impact. “I don’t think one day we’ll say, ‘Oh, isn’t that wonderful? We were dead and we’re resurrected in the world of work that looks like the world we always wanted,’” Goldin says.

It’s not that, but it’s an improvement, she said.