Does Telework Reduce Unequal Impacts of the COVID-19 Disaster on Job Losses Across Genders?

Disasters usually induce constraints that affect the work environment or work-life balance, thus having important consequences for workers’ labor market outcomes (i.e., unemployment, work absence, and layoff). Unfortunately, female workers tend to be more affected by changes in external constraints (e.g., the limited availability of childcare and/or domestic services) as female workers often (or are expected to) shoulder more childcare and/or household responsibilities. As a result, disasters tend to affect female workers more due to their often higher needs/preferences for flexibility and time to cope with the changes induced by disasters, suggesting increased gender inequality during disasters. In such a case, telework adjustment has emerged as a silver lining by providing workers with higher flexibility and helping them meet their needs/preferences. This paper investigates if there is any gender difference in telework adjustment, as a response to the disaster, and whether and to what extent telework adjustment can reduce the gender inequality induced by disasters, taking the COVID-19 disaster as an example. Results show that: 1) After accounting for the gender difference in job sorting, female workers’ telework adjustment rate is 7% higher than that of male workers and is also more responsive to external constraints. 2) Telework adjustment helps reduce the gender inequality in labor market outcomes via two means: i) the higher telework adjustment rate among female workers (which reduces gender inequality by 25.48%), and ii) the stronger marginal effect of telework adjustment on female workers (which reduces gender inequality by 31.94%). 3) Better digital infrastructure can enhance the mitigating effect of telework adjustment. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of constraints or telework, which suggests the generalizability of our results to any disaster or event that increases workers’ needs/preferences for flexibility and time. Our study advances the literature on how information technologies can be leveraged to mitigate disaster-induced gender inequality in the labor market.