The paper examines existing data and research on the gendered dimension of teleworking, highlighting the need for a consistently defined teleworking concept to be used across sources.

Study results show a significant gap between employment in occupations that could have been teleworking and actual teleworking before the pandemic for all employees. Furthermore, this gap was much more comprehensive for women than for men.

In the European Union, the gap between potential teleworking and actual working from home was much more comprehensive for women: 10 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women worked from home (occasionally or habitually) in 2018, while 30 percent of men and 45 percent of women could technically have teleworked.

This figure was also confirmed during the pandemic: on average, in the 10 OECD countries for which data is available, 39 percent of men worked from home in March 2020, compared to 42 percent of women. 

Also, the gender gap in preferences for frequent work-from-home increased during the pandemic. 

Available evidence suggests that the effect of teleworking on gendered work-life balance inequalities reflects prevailing gender norms and managerial culture. Teleworking increases work-life balance inequalities between men and women in some cases and reduces them in others.

Teleworking, along with other family-friendly flexibility measures, tends to be used mainly by mothers as a way to reconcile work and family commitments and could produce better results in terms of reducing gender inequalities in work-life balance if combined with other family-friendly policies and policies supporting a more equitable use of parental leave between mothers and fathers.

Results on the effect of teleworking on career progression are scarce and mixed.

Several additional measures should be implemented with teleworking to avoid potential career costs for women, including management training, particularly performance-based assessment.