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

“非典型”工作安排在大多数国家都很普遍，其中包括灵活的工作时间表、缩短的工作周、分担工作和在家工作。在英国，在家办公的人数从1998年的290万增加到2014年的420万，相当于就业人数的14%，另有180万人表示，如果有机会，他们更愿意在家工作。2018年，英国政府启动了灵活工作工作组，旨在鼓励灵活工作的可用性和采用，同时提高工作生活的质量。互联网技术一直是远程工作的关键推动者之一，允许员工在工作场所远程执行多项任务，同时与同事和经理保持联系。虽然非典型的工作安排往往是由那些特别重视其内在灵活性的人选择的，尤其是那些有家庭限制的女性，但一个可能的缺点是，她们的收入不稳定，升职的前景也会降低。在这项研究中，我们建议调查宽带互联网的可用性如何影响英国的远程工作，以及对工作安排、职业发展、考虑的工作范围以及最终工作人员匹配的地理位置的影响。我们将记录在家工作的解剖结构，并研究其在塑造受影响工人职业生涯中的作用，重点是其对薪酬和劳动力市场轨迹的性别差距的影响。为此，我们将结合来自多个行政和调查来源的二手数据，以揭示整个英国邮政编码（约150万）的互联网渗透和劳动力市场结果的模式。我们的第一个目标将是自20世纪90年代末以来宽带互联网的推出，远程工作的增长。在这样做的过程中，我们将把宽带信号质量的非常本地化的变化与电话网络技术升级的信息结合起来，以便预测在非常本地化的水平上远程工作的机会。此外，我们建议调查这种技术变革在具有不同特征（性别、年龄、技能、经验、家庭组成等）的个体之间的分布后果，以及在远程工作中具有不同渗透性的任务之间的分布后果。我们的第二个目标是探索远程工作对受影响员工职业生涯的影响。影响的一个关键渠道与远程工作的作用和相关的工作灵活性在工作与生活平衡方面的考虑有关。到目前为止，妇女仍然是儿童保育和家务劳动的主要提供者，她们往往比男性更重视灵活的工作时间表和更短的通勤时间，在组织中引入更大灵活性的职业比那些不成比例地奖励长时间和不灵活工作时间的职业在缩小收入差距方面取得了更大的成就。然而，最近的研究表明，即使在以完全灵活的工作时间为特征的“零工”经济领域，收入差距也持续存在。有证据还表明，男性上班通勤的时间通常比女性长，而且“性别通勤差距”在第一个孩子出生前后明显扩大。性别通勤差距可能与收入上的性别差距有关（这种差距在生孩子后也会扩大），因为女性在家庭责任的驱使下，可能愿意在离家更近的地方寻找工作，以换取更短通勤时间的可能性，并放弃在更远的地方发展职业的机会。在此背景下，我们探讨了在家工作对女性职业的重要性，特别是对她们的劳动力市场依恋、职业选择和职业发展的重要性。

"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.