Can Telework Adjustment Help Reduce Disaster-Induced Gender Inequality in Job Market Outcomes?

Disasters usually induce sudden changes to the work and home environment with significant consequences for workers’ labor market outcomes (i.e., unemployment, work absence, and layoff). Prior literature suggests that female workers tend to be more affected by such changes (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 because of their higher needs/preferences for flexibility and time to cope with the changes induced by disasters, leading to increased gender inequality during disasters. In such a case, telework adjustment has emerged as a silver lining by providing workers with more 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. Our analysis shows that (1) comparing workers in the same industry and holding the same occupation, we find that female workers’ telework adjustment rate is more responsive to external constraints and is 7% higher than that of male workers. (2) Telework adjustment helps reduce 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 other disasters or disruptions that induce changes and increase 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.