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Women across Britain could miss out on promotions and opportunities in their companies because they are less likely to want to return to the office after the working from home (WFH) guidance was lifted, experts said today.
Surveys carried out in recent months have found more men than women in London never want to WFH once the pandemic ends, while only one in ten women across the UK who are WFH plan to return to the office.
And today one of Britain’s top female bosses, Aviva chief executive Amanda Blanc, said she feared that if women continue to stay at home it would mean they are ‘not around when some of the conversations are being had’.
Ms Blanc, who is the Government’s Women in Finance champion and was in the top 30 of Forbes’ 100 most powerful women last year, said she wanted to ‘create the right environment for women to flourish’ in the sector.
She added that it was complex for the insurance giant’s 20,000 employees to come back into the office ‘because they’ve got to plan their lives around how they’re going to work, so the changing back and forth makes it difficult’.
Meanwhile psychology expert Sir Cary Cooper told MailOnline that he was concerned that women were less likely than men to go back into the office because being at home made family life and childcare more straightforward.
Working from home guidance was lifted on Wednesday last week having been in place since December 13 last year as part of Boris Johnson’s Plan B measures to help fight the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
It comes as a tax break allowing anyone WFH to claim for extra costs is set to be closed by HM Revenue and Customs after the benefit reportedly cost the Treasury nearly £500million during the pandemic.
The Government’s Women in Finance champion Amanda Blanc, chief executive of Aviva, said today that she feared that if women continue to stay at home it would mean they are ‘not around when some of the conversations are being had’
A woman walks through London Liverpool Street train station yesterday morning after Plan B measures were lifted in England
Almost every commuter standing on this platform at Canada Water station in East London on Monday appears to be male
HMRC is said to be reviewing the scheme, which allows anyone who has worked just one day at home in a year to claim an annual sum of up to £125. Some 4.9million successful claims have been made since March 2020.
Talking about how women are being impacted differently by being brought back into the office, Ms Blanc told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: ‘I do think that we need to think about what happens.
‘Because if what you see is that all the men come back into the office and the women don’t, then obviously the women are not around when some of the conversations are being had and they could miss out on opportunities and so that’s what I’m calling out, really, that I don’t want to happen.
‘We know that the progression of women in the financial services is just simply not good enough. We’re not moving women into more senior roles quickly enough – and I think it’s my role as the Government’s Women in Finance champion but also as a woman leading an organisation to make sure that we create the right environment for women to flourish and for women to be given the same opportunities as men.
‘So we just need to make sure that in the way that we work, we don’t jeopardise women’s opportunities.’
Speaking about the return to work of Aviva employees, she added: ‘My view is that we would like people to be in the office around three days a week. There’s going to be big flexibility around that.
‘I’m really keen that we do have some physical presence in the office, even though I think the way that we’ll work in the office will be different to pre-Covid.’
Meanwhile Sir Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, told MailOnline this morning that women were more likely to work at home because it was ‘easier for them’ if they have children.
He said: ‘Men are more into their careers and getting ahead and play organisational politics more than women.
‘My real worry is that men will go back into the office and women, because they have the primary care responsibility still, won’t go back into the office as much because it’s easier for them, they can do the school run, and that by not going in as often – they will go in two or three days a week in hybrid working, which is what I think will happen with a lot of people, men will go in more than women – and it will disadvantage women because if you’re there, just showing facetime, men are still in the senior roles still, this will disadvantage your career.
‘Unfortunately I think that will happen, unless men during this two-year period have understood the value of children and understood the nature of their role in the family and got some benefit from being with kids – other than home schooling because no one liked that, it’s hard, it’s really hard work and should make us appreciate teachers more – but if men did, and there will be some who did, there would have been some men who were full time in the office but didn’t take up flexible working options, even then it was women who took it and men didn’t.
‘The reason was they thought it would adversely affect their career. Now it won’t but they’re still very ambitious on balance, their identity comes from work, and they understand the significance of organisational politics.
Peloton-riding civil servant DID get out of the house last summer to enjoy free tickets to Euro 2020 football and a night at the Brit Awards
Sarah Healey heads into work in London yesterday morning
The senior civil servant who boasted how much she loved working from home did manage to get out of the house last summer – to enjoy some lavish hospitality.
Sarah Healey, permanent secretary at the culture department, spoke last year about how she liked being able to get on her Peloton exercise bike during the day because she did not have to spend so much time commuting.
She also told a conference how working from home had also enabled her to spend more time with her three teenage children.
Now it has emerged that during the summer, Mrs Healey benefited from free tickets to concerts and football matches. She attended the Brit Awards , along with two England football matches during the Euro championships. There was also a concert and two dinners.
Mrs Healey’s annual salary was in the £165,000-£170,000 bracket last September, a higher band than the previous year, when she was in the £160,000 to £165,000 bracket. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s pointed out her pay rise was about 1 per cent.
Ministers are continuing to pile pressure on Whitehall officials to return to the office after Boris Johnson ditched work from home guidance.
Inquiries by the Daily Mail have found Mrs Healey appears to have split her working week between the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Westminster office and her £1million Victorian home in the trendy south London suburb of East Dulwich.
Her property has been undergoing expensive renovation works. In September – before the Omicron wave at a time when ministers were urging people to get back to the office – Mrs Healey told a London Tech Week conference that the pandemic had been a ‘very, very good thing’ for flexible working.
‘I have a Peloton and I can just get on my bike whenever I have a teeny bit of time,’ she said. ‘That has been a huge benefit to my well-being.’
A source said Mrs Healey had worked in Whitehall every day since working from home restrictions were eased. Today she arrived at the office at around 11.30am having travelled from home.
‘I’m just hoping that men learn something during this period of time and develop much more of a role within the family and their kids.’
Asked whether he thought the return to the office would be better for men or women, Sir Cary added: ‘I think it will be more of a boost to men, because showing facetime, being there, has benefits no matter what you do, no matter how productive you are – that’s the irony.
‘The evidence pre-Covid was both men and women wanting more flexible working, but men on balance did not take it anywhere near the rate that women did because women thought they were the primary carers of kids, even though they knew it would damage their career.
‘I personally think what we’re going to see is a return – I think that men will go in much significantly more than women. Maybe men will take a day, maximum two days working from home – and that women will be two or three days at home. That’s what i think will happen, but we don’t know how men have been affected by these two years in terms of their role in the family and their relationships.’
It comes after a YouGov poll found last week that more men than women in London never want to WFH once the pandemic has ended – with the survey also discovering that pre-Covid around half of working men and six in ten working women in in the capital had never WFH.
Some 31 per cent of male working men said their preference after the pandemic would be ‘never working from home’, but this dropped to 21 per cent for female workers.
In addition, there has been a rise in the proportion of women who wish to WFH some of the time – from 25 per cent before to 50 per cent wanting to do so in the future. And for those WFH all the time, the figure is up from 12 per cent to 23 per cent.
For men, 41 per cent want to WFH some of the time, rising from 31 per cent – and the figure for all the time has gone up from 13 per cent to 23 per cent.
The poll, revealed in the Evening Standard last week, also found that 35 per cent of workers in London were WFH all the time, 27 per cent some of the time and 32 per cent not at all.
And a survey of women home workers for the Daily Telegraph last November by FindOutNow found that only one in 10 WFH women plan to return to the office.
The study also found that just 6 per cent thought they were missing out on opportunities because they were not in the office, compared to 9 per cent of men.
Lauren Fabianski from the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed told MailOnline today: ‘Proximity bias – also known as ‘bad management’ – has been an issue way longer than the pandemic. Research from Stanford in 2015 showed that even though home workers were more productive, they weren’t rewarded at the same rates as their colleagues who worked in the office.
‘We also know that you are twice as likely to be promoted if you work full time than if you work part time. But it’s great to see large employers like Aviva considering how new company wide policies on how we work could disproportionately impact upon women in their organisation rather than just rolling out changes and hoping for the best.
‘We often think that society is progressing in a way that things like childcare, cooking and cleaning are more evenly split among the sexes but we’ve still got a long way to go, it’s actually getting worse right now rather than better.
‘UN Women released research that showed Covid-19 restrictions lead to a larger increase in unpaid work for women than it did for men and as we return to the office we need to consider how workers can sustainably balance their work-life with their home-life.
‘Pushing for a continuation of home working isn’t the solution for everyone though, we hear a lot from parents who are craving in person connection that video-calls just aren’t creating.
ANALYSIS: ‘People who need to work from home to juggle work and caring responsibilities are missing out’
By SARAH COLES, senior personal finance analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown
Hargreaves Lansdown senior personal finance analyst Sarah Coles
At the moment, working more flexibly can stand in the way of career progression.
The Office for National Statistics figures show that before the crisis, those who had worked exclusively from home for years were paid 7 per cent less than those who never did, and were less than half as likely to have been promoted.
People who need to work from home in order to juggle work and caring responsibilities are missing out.
And while there’s no reason why women should face the brunt of caring responsibilities, right now the reality is that they do.
Government figures from just over a year ago showed that women were doing 99 per cent more unpaid childcare than men.
For some managers, being out of sight means being out of mind, while others are trapped in the mindset that people who need to work flexibly aren’t as serious about their careers.
Managers who measure staff by the inputs they can see, rather than by their outputs, vastly underestimate the value of their remote staff.
The problem isn’t necessarily the flexible working itself: it also owes an enormous amount to these kinds of attitudes.
The pandemic has shown just how effectively many people can work from home.
The ONS figures found that homeworkers work for longer, put in more unpaid hours, and take less time off sick – so many of them are more committed than they would be in the office.
Businesses need to adapt to find ways to make sure that anyone working flexibility gets the same opportunities as anyone working full time in the office.
If we assume that the answer to this problem is to force everyone back into a workplace – and demand that those with caring responsibilities to make a choice – we risk squandering the enormous potential of a huge chunk of the workforce.
It also reinforces an artificial divide whereby one half of a couple is the breadwinner and the other makes career sacrifices in order to care.
And at the moment, the people making those sacrifices tend to be women – which is why at the start of the pandemic only 5 per cent of dads worked part time and 37 per cent of mums did.
It’s only when workplaces allow more flexibility for everyone that we will see more equality in the way roles are divided, so that everyone can balance work and home life more effectively.
The real answer may lie in how we view flexible work, and retraining managers to understand the enormous potential of this vastly overlooked group of employees.
Everyone should have the opportunity to find the balance that works for them, without having to accept that they’ll pay a price for it.
‘What we actually want is flexibility as a default so workers have roles that fit around their lives rather than bending themselves out of shape to fit their lives around restrictive work requirements, but if you want to see this kind of working embraced by all staff and not just the working mums in your office then there is much more you need to implement across the business.
‘Practices like the ‘leave loudly’ approach, which encourages senior executives to leave the office on time to go and collect their children, and to do so loudly demonstrate to other members of staff that presenteeism is not encouraged, that it is okay to leave the office on time, and that it is not frowned upon to openly talk about your commitments outside of work.
‘We are campaigning to see employers list the flexible working options available to their staff in their job adverts. This way they will be embedding flexible working into their culture from the outset and workers will be more likely to take up these options, rather than trying to shoehorn flexibility into a system that wasn’t designed that way.’
One of Britain’s leading female economists Catherine Mann, who is on the Bank of England ‘s Monetary Policy Committee, warned last November that women who continue to WFH risk hurting their careers.
The former Citigroup global chief economist said a hybrid form of working could open ‘two tracks’ and widen the gender gap – and warned that a disparity between the number of men and women returning to the workplace is emerging due to difficulties accessing childcare and disruptions to schooling related to Covid.
This means more men have been returning to offices while women continue working from home or taking a hybrid approach.
She told a Financial News virtual event for women in finance last November: ‘Virtual platforms are way better than they were even five years ago. But the extemporaneous, spontaneity – those are hard to replicate in a virtual setting,’.
Ms Mann added: ‘There is the potential for two tracks. There’s the people who are on the virtual track and people who are on a physical track. I do worry that we will see those two tracks develop, and we will pretty much know who’s going to be on which track, unfortunately.’
Meanwhile, experts said yesterday that they are ‘increasingly concerned’ with the high level of risk of understaffed maternity care due to unvaccinated staff.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has called for the Government to reconsider introducing regulations on mandatory coronavirus vaccination due to the impact of staff shortages on pregnant mothers.
Frontline staff in the NHS and registered social care settings, except care homes where the rules are already in place, must have their first vaccine doses by February 3 if they are to continue in their roles from April, unless they are exempt.
The RCOG estimates a shortfall of around 500 doctors and 2,000 midwives, even before the coronavirus pandemic.
It has encouraged all members and anyone working in maternity care and the NHS to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
New figures from NHS England show that 127,515 NHS and domiciliary care staff working in registered settings still have not had a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
Dr Edward Morris, president of the RCOG, said: ‘Vaccination is by far the best way to protect themselves and the patients they care for, and to reduce the impact of staff absence and the disruption to services this causes.
‘However we are increasingly concerned about the risk to safe staffing of maternity services that the new regulations being introduced on mandatory vaccination will cause, an issue which has been highlighted by our colleagues in the Royal College of Midwives. Maternity services require specialist staff whose skill cannot be replicated elsewhere in the NHS.
‘The risk of doctors, midwives or maternity support workers being dismissed from frontline roles in maternity because they are unvaccinated creates a far greater risk to maternity services’ ability to deliver safe, high-quality care for women.
‘We ask that the Government reconsiders introducing this policy at this time because of the impact on the safe delivery of maternity services. A delay would allow more time to help maternity staff with concerns or hesitancies feel more confident about having the vaccine.’
Source: Daily Mail
