Internet diffusion, remote work opportunities, and the careers of men and women

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"Atypical" work arrangements have become widespread in most countries, including - among other categories - flexible work schedules, compressed workweeks, job sharing and working from home. The number of people working from home in the UK has risen from 2.9 million in 1998 to 4.2 million in 2014, corresponding to 14% of those in employment, and an additional 1.8 million people report they would prefer to work for home if they were given the chance. In 2018 the UK Government launched the Flexible Working Task Force with the aim to encourage the availability and uptake of flexible working, while improving the quality of working lives.Internet technology has been one key enabler of remote working, allowing employees to perform several tasks remotely from their workplaces, while remaining connected to their coworkers and managers. While atypical work arrangements are often chosen by individuals who especially value their inherent flexibility, and most notably women with family constraints, one likely downside is their associated earnings instability and reduced prospects of promotion. In this research we propose to investigate how the availability of broadband internet has shaped remote working in Britain, with consequences on working arrangements, career progression, the range of jobs considered and ultimately the geography of job-worker matches. We will document the anatomy of working from home and study its role in shaping the careers of affected workers, with an emphasis on its consequences for the gender gaps in pay and labour market trajectories. To this purpose we will combine secondary data from several administrative and survey sources to uncover patterns of internet penetration and labour market outcomes across the universe of British postcodes (around 1.5 million). Our first objective will be to the growth in remote work to the rollout of broadband internet since the late 1990s. In doing this, we will combine very localized variation in broadband signal quality with information on the telephone network technological upgrades in order to predict opportunities of working remotely at the very local level. Alongside, we propose to investigate distributional consequences of this technological change across individuals with different characteristics (gender, age, skills, experience, family composition, etc.) and across tasks that are differentially permeable to remote work. Our second objective consists in exploring the consequences of remote work on the careers of affected workers. One key channel of impact relates to the role of remote work and the associated work flexibility in work-life balance considerations. As women remain to date the main providers of childcare and domestic work in general, they tend to value flexible work schedules and shorter commutes more than men, and professions that introduced greater flexibility in their organization have achieved greater reductions in their earnings gap than professions that disproportionately reward long and inflexible hours. However, recent work has shown evidence of persistent earnings gaps even in areas of the `gig' economy characterized by completely flexible work schedules. Evidence also shows that men typically have longer work commutes than women, and that the 'gender commuting gap' widens markedly around the birth of the first child. The gender commuting gap is potentially linked to the gender gap in earnings (which also widens upon child birth), as women are induced by family responsibilities to search for jobs closer to home may be willing to trade off higher wages for the possibility of a shorter commute and forgo opportunities of career development further afield. Against this backdrop, we explore the importance of working from home for women's careers, and in particular their labour market attachment, occupational choices and career progression.