Women Want to Work from Home
August 31, 2021
Fifteen years ago, a nationally representative sample of mothers with children under age 18 were asked to identify their “ideal” work situation: full-time, part-time, no employment, or working for pay from home. At the time, almost one out of every three mothers identified “working for pay from home” as ideal. The problem was that only 1 percent of moms actually had that work situation. In fact, working for pay from home was largely unheard of at that time.
Fast forward 15 years, and the fallout from a global pandemic has opened up what many never thought possible. Perhaps unsurprisingly, parents like it. Recent findings from the Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institution survey of 2,500 American adults found that more than half (53 percent) of mothers say Covid-19 has made them more likely to prefer to work from home either most (34 percent) or half (19 percent) of the time.
