Brief analysis 13: Will working from home reduce the gender pay gap?
During the coronavirus pandemic, working from home was used on a large scale for the first time. Although many people were unable to work from home efficiently due to the closure of schools and nurseries, we can still assume that working from home is here to stay. This is because, under "normal" circumstances, companies could significantly reduce their costs without sacrificing productivity. However, the growth rates vary depending on the sector, activity and number of hours worked from home. Some also see the widespread use of teleworking as a solution to the "gender pay gap", which describes the income differences between women and men that have always existed in the labor market.
Austria is one of the European countries with the highest income differences between men and women. This is primarily due to the fact that women in this country leave the workforce more than women elsewhere when they have children. However, in those countries where many mothers are no longer active in the labor market at all, the gender pay gaps are also smaller, as these women are not even included in the statistics. In Austria, on the other hand, participation rates in the labor market are high. However, mothers in particular mainly work part-time, which in turn makes the gender pay gap statistically higher.
A recent EcoAustria brief analysis discusses the impact of working from home on the gender pay gap against the background of the economic literature. Overall, the role of working from home in combating the gender pay gap should probably not be overestimated. As long as gender roles are not affected by working from home, little will change in terms of income differences between women and men. On the other hand, the pandemic could set things in motion. Change needs good examples, and we have them here in Germany with all those families in which the father works from home as an office worker because the mother is indispensable as a systemically important worker, as a doctor, nurse or saleswoman in a grocery store. These parents can become role models through their new matter-of-factness. In this way, Covid-19 could make an unexpected and paradoxical contribution to changing gender roles.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}();
