What our findings suggest is that all workers suffer from career penalties when working remotely, and this is especially true when it is primarily framed as a solution for parenting or care, as it can subtly shape how managers interpret its use. In those contexts, remote working may be seen less as a legitimate way of driving performance and more as a response to offering flexibility for family life.”
Professor Heejung Chung, Professor of Work and Employment and Director of King's Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King’s Business School
16 March 2026
Remote working policies aimed at parents raises questions around productivity
Framing remote working as a policy just for mothers or parents negatively impacts how managers view flexible working for all staff, with remote workers more likely to experience career penalties.
The new study from the King’s Business School at King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, published in Gender, Work & Organisations, found that when policies target mothers or parents, managers have worse perceptions of remote working for commitment, productivity, team spirit, and promotion opportunities.
However, framing it as a policy for everyone to enable more workers to take up remote working, regardless of their gender or parenthood status, can help minimise stigma around flexible working.
Targeting remote working largely to mothers or parents could suggest that it is a policy primarily used to meet work-family demands, signalling to managers that it is not compatible with commitment and productivity.
Researchers found that the negative effects of remote working are more pronounced for non-mother groups, especially fathers, compared with mothers. This is largely because the stereotype of motherhood is already strongly ingrained and managers often already hold biases against mothers’ work capacity and motivation. Remote working does not necessarily add additional bias that managers have against mothers’ work capacities but rather confirms them.
On the other hand, for fathers given their assumed roles as breadwinners, their remote working especially when it is seen as done for caregiving purposes may make them deviate away their expected roles increasing the career penalties they can face.
Dr. Senhu Wang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore said “These findings carry important implications for the future design of workplace family-friendly policies, including flexible working arrangements. A universal design approach can reduce stigma associated with policy uptake, minimize unintended exclusion of eligible workers, and encourage broader organizational adoption. By embedding flexibility as a standard feature of job design rather than as a special accommodation, policymakers and employers may enhance both policy effectiveness and equity across the workforce”.
The study drew on a national sample of managers in Singapore to look at how the framing of remote working can influence the bias managers have around remote working. It used hypothetical scenarios to examine how managers’ perceptions of remote working change depending on a colleague’s gender-parenthood status and in different remote working contexts. Examples of these scenarios included fathers who were working 2-3 days a week from home versus working in the office 5 days a week or situations where it was mostly mothers (80%) working from home, and very few other workers (10% or less). The authors also found similar results in their data for the UK and Germany.
A previous study by Chung showed that the expansion of remote working has the potential to reduce labour market inequalities by enabling a wider range of people, for example mothers, to better participate in paid work. However, long-standing norms around work, gender and care mean that remote working can also reinforce existing inequalities if policies are not designed and implemented carefully.
The paper: Revisiting flexibility stigma: How framing remote working shapes bias against remote workers is published in the journal Gender Work and Organization. Article DOI: 10.1111/gwao.70115
You can view a TedX Talk by Professor Chung which was based on this paper here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xHQWLjE6xQ
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Professor of Work and Employment and Director of King's Global Institute for Women's Leadership