for the trade-off between women’s career aspirations and traditional gender roles associated with motherhood.

In this context, we test the implicit assumption that telework is an attractive option for women who face high fixed costs of working away from home.<sup>12</sup> Our results show that women with higher education are more likely to jointly generate household (i.e., care for dependents) and work production when working from home, providing an incentive to remain in the labor force. This effect is most significant for collegeeducated women, thus having the potential to encourage highly productive women to participate. Not surprisingly, college education is connected to a high reduction in the probability of staying at home. Interestingly, among men, the case is similar regarding teleworking but not regarding staying at home. Indeed, we find that family characteristics divide the labor force status between men and women, whereas age, education, and socioeconomic status do not. Almost all women are less likely to participate in the labor market if there are children in the household or if they are married/partnered; whereas all men in these groups are more likely to participate under these circumstances.

Telework can help women with dependents stay in employment and potentially increase female labor force participation and overall labor productivity. Teleworking could help women with small children and college education to keep working, but once children are above 3 years old, education does not make teleworking more likely. Indeed, we find that telework is not a substitute for reliable childcare, so additional policies on this front are needed. With these insights, the use of telework should be seen as a tool for workplace flexibility that can support women with caregiving responsibilities. It has the advantage of eliminating the time required to commute and expanding women’s choices for dependent care, such as on-site care centers as well as home-based supervision or childcare arrangements, which may be more cost-effective or convenient for the family.

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the existing literature related to work from home and gender. Section 3 presents the theoretical framework used to explain women’s choices related to where and how to work. Section 4 details the data and explains the empirical methodology. Section 5 presents the results of the multinomial model for women, and we compared them with men. Section 6 briefly discusses the policy implication and concludes.

# 2. Related Literature

The increase in the use of information technology in the last decade has shaped the labor market. One example of that is teleworking. This work arrangement enables people to work from home and the possibility of combining work with home responsibilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government-mandated lockdown inevitably brought negative consequences to the labor market, while having more pronounced effects on women as school closures heightened their household responsibilities. For instance, 46 percent of women report having experienced an increase in childcare responsibilities during the pandemic compared to 30 percent of men (World Bank High Frequency Household Survey, 2021). Throughout that time, telework may have been the easiest way to care for

> 12 Edwards & Field-Hendrey (2002) explain that the attractiveness is given by the possibility of combining unpaid domestic work with gainful home-based employment.

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