Does remote work help mothers stay in the workforce?

As parental leave and support continues to be an issue of debate and political analysis, discussions often fail to identify whether these entitlements address the realities and challenges of being a working mother.

Further to an article authored by Rachel Lee and Penelope Lukes of the independent research institute e61, which examined whether working from home actually increases employment, HR Leader spoke to the organisation’s research director, Gianni La Cava, to further probe the factors that influence working mothers in the workforce and when flexibility is most useful.

According to La Cava, Australian evidence broadly speaks to a relationship between working from home and allowing mothers to stay in paid work, but it has not been directly correlated with the recent increase in mothers’ employment.

This has been identified in Australian Bureau of Statistics data, which revealed the employment rate of mothers with a youngest dependent child aged 0-14 increased from 68.6 per cent in 2019 to 76.5 per cent in 2025. Further, Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey data also found that the share of mothers doing at least a portion of their usual hours at home rose more than 10 per cent between 2019 and 2024.

These patterns, La Cava said, “are consistent with WFH helping some mothers remain employed, but they are not proof that it caused the increase … women who intend to return to work may choose flexible jobs in advance, and mothers’ employment was already rising before the pandemic”.

La Cava noted that time remains the biggest reason Australians seek remote or flexible work – both in terms of control over the working day, and that of no commute. The data found that more than 20 per cent said the main reason was greater flexibility or control over hours; another approximate 20 per cent used it to catch up on work out of hours; 12.7 per cent cited commuting time or cost; and another 9 per cent cited family responsibilities as the main factor.

La Cava pointed to the availability and price of childcare, the actual degree of flexibility offered, and the division of unpaid labour as the main constraints affecting mothers returning to work. Childcare, he said, is a strong constraint that does not disappear when working from home, adding that Australian research has found that mothers work less in areas where childcare is less available, lower quality, or more expensive.

He also highlighted that employment rose during periods of strong labour demand, further pointing away from WFH as the whole explanation for recent gains.

HILDA research also found that mothers take almost 80 per cent of additional unpaid work when their first child arrives, while at the same time, their paid hours fall sharply.

La Cava said: “WFH should not, however, be thought about as a substitute for childcare. Our Australian time-use analysis does not show mothers substituting WFH for formal care, nor does it find evidence that WFH materially reduced their unpaid workload.”

In this way, employers can address issues in returning to work with support accessing affordable, high-quality early childhood education and care. To start, La Cava urged employers not to design WFH arrangements “on the assumption that an employee can work and care for a young child at the same time”, adding that it is worth considering control over hours as well as location.

“Predictable schedules and secure reduced-hours roles may matter as much as the number of days spent in the office,” he said.

Finally, La Cava encouraged managers to monitor the boundary between flexibility and additional work, given that people who work from home can more easily work overtime to catch up after hours.

As recently covered, low rates of secondary caregiver leave uptake by fathers also contribute to the ability of the mother or primary caregiver to return to work.

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