Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-site Work

Remote work has dramatically transformed professional environments, sparking considerable scholarly interest in its impact on employees and organizations. Contributing to this burgeoning literature, we investigate how remote versus on-site work affects women’s experiences of gender discrimination. Given that work location can alter the gendered nature of interactions, we focus on everyday gender discrimination: slights and offenses that occur in interactions and are perceived by recipients as reflecting gender bias. Integrating gender frame theory and scholarship on virtual work, we argue that the gender frame tends to be less salient in remote settings. Thus, we predict that women experience less everyday gender discrimination when working remotely than on-site. Moreover, because the gender frame is likely to be more salient during on-site work for younger women and those who work with mostly men, we expect that these women experience a particularly pronounced reduction in everyday gender discrimination when working remotely. To test these predictions, we developed a new measure of everyday gender discrimination and conducted an original survey of 1,091 professional women who work in the same job both remotely and on-site. We find that women consistently report less everyday gender discrimination in remote versus on-site work. This effect is particularly pronounced for younger women and those who interact mainly with men. Overall, this study advances research on how work location shapes workers’ outcomes and experiences, enriches the literature on the trade-offs women face in virtual and on-site settings, and extends scholarship on the contextual factors shaping workplace discrimination. Funding: This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant 435-2020-0059], the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Institute for Pandemics and the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the University of Toronto. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16949 .