Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Figure 1. Remote Work vs. the Ability to Work Remotely

Figure 1 compares usage of remote work with remote ability. In February 2020, usage of remote work was between 9 and 10 percent (black line). Remote work because of the pandemic (purple line) peaked in May 2020 and gradually declined over subsequent months, reaching 5.2 percent of employment by September 2022. Starting in October 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) added new supplemental questions to the Current Population Survey (CPS); those questions focused on remote work more generally and pointed to almost 20 percent of workers reported to working remotely for all or part of the survey reference week (green line) in recent months. The light blue line shows a measure of remote ability built upon Montenovo et al. (2020), which characterizes occupations as displaying the ability to work remotely if email, phone, and memo usage is very important. Remote ability has hovered around 50 percent of employment since 2020.

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Figure 2. Remote Utilization

Figure 2 presents measures of remote utilization, defined as the ratio of remote usage to remote ability in any given month. In purple, remote utilization because of COVID-19 peaked in May 2020 and gradually declined over time, reflecting the behavior of remote usage because of the pandemic. Remote utilization, in green, has been around 40 percent, around double the pre-pandemic levels (black dashed line).

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Figure 3. Remote Ability and Remote Utilization by Gender

Figure 3 illustrates the features of remote ability and remote utilization across males and females. Historically, women have been employed in occupations with higher remote ability; a larger gap in ability between females and males opened up at the end of 2019 (left panel). The differences in ability explain why female remote utilization is slight below that of males (right panel); differences in utilization—of 3 percentage points (pp) as of February 2020—however, have become less pronounced over time.

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Figure 4. Remote Utilization by Gender for Prime-Age Adults

Figure 4 shows remote utilization for prime-age individuals. Remote utilization for both male and female prime-aged individuals was above 100 percent in May 2020, likely reflecting issues either with the data definition or missing observation. As with other measures, remote utilization declined from the May 2020 peak; in recent months, it averaged around 60 percent. Differences in utilization between men and women have shrunk over the post-pandemic period and relative to February 2020 (dashed and dash-dotted lines), from 5 pp to a little over 3 pp.

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Figure 5. Labor Force Participation, Prime-Age Individuals

Figure 5 compares the labor force participation rates between the group of jobs that can be performed remotely (Remote, green line) and the group of jobs that cannot be performed remotely (Non-Remote, blue line) for both prime-age men (left panel) and women (right panel). Interestingly, since 2011, the overall improvement in labor force participation for all prime-age individuals is entirely linked to occupations that can be performed remotely; conversely, participation in non-remote occupations was flat or slightly declining. More recently, however, the relative importance of the two groups in explaining participation across prime-age men and women has changed. While the gap in participation for prime-age men between remote and non-remote jobs had mostly closed just before the COVID-19 pandemic and, subsequently, participation rates for the two groups of jobs have moved roughly in parallel, prime-age women in remote jobs continued to experience gains in participation from access to remote work throughout 2021; as the labor market continued to tighten into 2023, gains in participation accrued more rapidly to women in jobs that could not be performed remotely.

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Figure 6. Counterfactual Experiment: Prime-Age Female Labor Force Participation, Current Remote Ability vs. Remote Ability as of April 2003

Figure 6 present a counterfactual measure of participation. In particular, I construct a measure of labor force participation for prime-age women in jobs that could be performed remotely as of April 2003. The figure then compares the counterfactual measure of prime-age women’s participation (teal line) with the actual participation (green line) that takes on board the expansion in the set of jobs that can be performed remotely. While participation in remote jobs improved since 2011, even for those that were already considered remote as of April 2003, the adoption of remote features in other occupations implied an even faster improvement for the prime-age women labor force participation rate. In the post-pandemic period, the improvement in the counterfactual measure (teal line) becomes more salient, particularly after 2022.

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