A 14-year study of nearly 40,000 UK workers has shown that remote working helped men before the pandemic, harmed professional women, which then reversed as it became normalised.
The research from King’s Business School and published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, tracked people between 2009 and 2023, comparing periods before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr Constance Beaufils and Professor Heejung Chung found that before March 2020, working from home was linked to better mental health for men across job types. For professional women, the opposite was true, their mental health worsened as homeworking became more common in their roles.
The researchers point to two pressures. In high-status workplaces, a “flexibility stigma” meant women working from home felt the need to prove their commitment by working longer hours and staying constantly available. At the same time, homeworking did not reduce their workload. Instead, it allowed professional and caregiving demands to overlap, without the boundaries an office provides as Professor Chung’s previous studies have shown. The result was not balance, but more work.
By contrast, women in lower-paid roles saw clear benefits when homeworking became available. With less control over their schedules, the added flexibility helped reduce strain.
From March 2020, this pattern reversed. As working from home became widespread and accepted, professional women began to see significant improvements in mental health, while the benefits for men weakened.
The researchers suggest this reflects a shift in workplace culture. As stigma reduced, women no longer needed to overcompensate when working from home. At the same time, men took on more unpaid domestic work post-pandemic, especially when working from home, which may have reduced the mental health gains they previously experienced and helped redistribute pressures at home.
"Working from home is not inherently good or bad for mental health," said Dr Constance Beaufils, researcher at the French National Institute of
Health and Medical Research, and associate at the King’s Global
Institute for Women’s Leadership. "Its impact depends on who has access to it, the pressures people face at work and at home, and how organisations support it. Before the pandemic, those who stood to benefit most often had the least access. If flexible working is to reduce inequalities, it needs to be more widely available and backed by broader support, such as childcare.
Professor Heejung Chung, Director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, added: "For years, working from home was seen as the solution to wellbeing. Our research shows it was making things worse for some, particularly professional women, who were expected to manage full-time work and care at the same time. What changed after the pandemic was not the policy, but the culture. Rolling that back now risks undoing those gains."
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