Half believe homeworking improves women’s career progress

A YouGov survey carried out for the BBC has found that just over half (56%) of women thought working from home would help them progress at work, since “childcare and caring duties become less of a hindrance to working full-time”.

However, a quarter of respondents said homeworking was unlikely to advance their careers, while the highest rates of homeworking during the pandemic have been among those with professional occupations. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has previously established that jobs requiring higher qualifications and more experience have been more likely to provide homeworking opportunities than manual occupations.

The BBC quoted ONS figures which showed that women carried out on average two-thirds more of the childcare duties per day than men during the first pandemic lockdown; between 13 January and 7 February 2021, women with a school-aged child (67%) were more likely than men (52%) to say they had personally home-schooled a child in their home in the past week.

Of the 1,684 women polled by YouGov, the greatest believers in the career benefits of homeworking were those aged between 18 and 24 (65%) and women in London (61%). Fewer than half of the women polled in Scotland agreed (49%), the BBC said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58708958