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Time Magazine
6 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce
It's a stark number: 212,000. That's how many women ages 20 and over have left the workforce since January, according to the most recent jobs numbers released Aug. 1 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (By contrast, 44,000 men have entered the workforce since January.) The numbers show a reversal of recent trends that saw more women, especially women with children, finding and keeping full-time jobs. Data show that between January and June, labor force participation rate of women ages 25 to 44 living with a child under five fell nearly three percentage points, from 69.7% to 66.9%, says Misty Lee Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas. It's a big reversal. The participation of those women had soared in 2022, 2023, and 2024, peaking in January 2025, as flexible work policies helped women join the workforce and generate much-needed income for their families. Workers have seen flexibility revoked in 2025 on a large scale. President Donald Trump ordered federal employees back to the office five days a week in January, though many had negotiated remote work arrangements and some had even moved far away from their offices. Amazon, JP Morgan, and AT&T also returned to five days a week policies in 2025. Overall, full-time in-office requirements among Fortune 500 companies jumped to 24% in the second quarter of 2025, up from 13% in the end of 2024, according to the Flex Index, which tracks remote work policies. This has hit women with a bachelor's degree in particular; their labor-force participation rate, which had been falling for decades before the pandemic, started ticking up again in 2020, peaking at 70.3% in September in 2024. It's been falling ever since, and stood at 67.7% in July 2025, according to the most recent jobs report. Read More: As People Return to Offices, It's Back to Misery for America's Working Moms It's not a coincidence that women's participation in the workforce is falling as flexibility disappears, says Julie Vogtman, senior director of job quality for the National Women's Law Center. Women capitalized on remote work and flexibility during the pandemic and stopped exiting the labor force, research shows. Now, many are not able to do so. 'Women still take on the lion's share of caregiving responsibilities, and they are more likely than men to be navigating how to meet those caregiving responsibilities while holding down a job,' she says. 'They are also more likely than men to feel that they have to leave the workforce when their balancing act becomes unmanageable.' Return-to-office policies are not proven to make companies more productive. One 2024 study of resumes at Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple found that return-to-office policies led to an exodus of senior employees, which posed a potential threat to competitiveness of the larger firm. And nearly two-thirds of C-suite executives said that return-to-work mandates caused a 'disproportionate number' of females to quit, according to a 2024 survey conducted by Walr, a data-collection agency, on behalf of Upwork and Workplace Intelligence. Many of those CEOs who reported women quitting said they were struggling to fill jobs because of that loss of female employees and that their overall workforce productivity is down. 'When I hear about these companies making everyone go back to the office, the most normal situation is it's being ordered by some old white male person with what I call care privilege, which is that they have someone who cooks their meals, irons their clothes, or picks their kids up from daycare,' says Heggeness. Read More: Trump's Return-to-Office Push Is a Mistake The disappearance of flexibility is not the only reason women are leaving the workforce in 2025. Some of the decline in participation comes from lower-income women in jobs that have historically had to be done in person full-time, even during the pandemic. Those women are struggling because federal dollars for childcare have declined significantly in 2025. That money helped many centers stay open and charge lower tuition than they otherwise would have. That funding ended in September 2024, forcing many centers to close or raise tuition, leaving some families without options. What's more, the mass deportations occurring throughout the country now are affecting childcare providers, about 20% of whom are immigrants, according to Vogtman. Even if workers have legal status, some may be afraid to come to work, and others may have lost their own childcare and have to stay home as a result, she says. The federal funding helped some providers keep their costs down; now, childcare expenses are rising again. The amount of money American families spent on nursery, elementary, and secondary schools fell in much of 2023 and 2024, and then started to rise again in the fourth quarter of 2024, when it jumped 3.3%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It has risen every quarter in 2025.. 'You have a population of working women who are finding it increasingly difficult to make the math work,' Vogtman says. Those include many federal government workers, who may have been drawn to their jobs because government jobs were long seen as flexible, with good benefits like parental leave, says Heggeness. Research suggests that women are more likely to take a lower-paying job if there are benefits attached like telework and flexibility around timing their schedule, she says. If those jobs then experience massive layoffs—as federal workers have under Trump's downsizing—women could be disproportionately affected. As women leave the workforce, the Trump Administration is exploring ways to encourage women to get married and have more children in order to slow the country's decline in birth rate. But Heggeness suspects that forcing federal government workers back to the office makes many women choose between having children and pursuing their careers—and many might choose the latter. 'What they are doing right now, with the return-to-work policies and their leading by example, is the exact opposite of what you'd want to be doing from a policy perspective if you really care about increasing birth rates,' Heggeness says. Of course, for some women, leaving the workforce can be a blessing, if their partners have stable jobs that provide a good income. They have more time to spend with their families, and some are freelancing or starting their own businesses. Sarah Wedge moved out of Philadelphia during the pandemic; her employment ended when her company called employees back to the office, she says, and she decided she didn't want to move her family back. Now, she's freelancing and spending more time with her three-year-old daughter. 'I'm a mom, and that's part of why I've enjoyed freelancing; it's the whole fluid schedule that's great,' she says. But there are reasons to be concerned about women leaving the workforce. Without two salaries, many families struggle to afford basics like housing, food, and transportation; they have less money to spend, which means less money circulating in the economy. Their health care and other benefits are more precarious in an economy where only one partner works. Economic growth has slowed in the first half of the year; in the long term, slowing growth worsens people's standard of living. For many women, this is more than an economic problem: it's a depressing reminder that the brief period of time when work-from-home reigned—when balancing family and work was actually sometimes possible—is over. Read More: Flexible Employers Were a Pandemic Blip Big picture, women's labor-force participation has stalled in the U.S. in recent decades, peaking in the early 2000s even as it rose in many countries in Europe. But then, during the pandemic, rates started rising again, as women could handle childcare pickup and dropoff and other caregiving responsibilities while working from home. Among married women, rates rose from 56.9% in Jan. 2021 to 59% in Jan. 2024. 'What is most heartbreaking about all of this is that the pandemic felt like this revolution, where they finally realized we're human beings and they'll treat us with some degree of respect,' says a mother of two whose company went back to mandating three in-office workdays, but which granted her a temporary exception, meaning she is still able to work remotely full time. 'In the pandemic, they were saying, 'We care about you as people, and we understand that your well-being contributes to your productivity at work,'' she says. The mother, who does not want her name used because she doesn't want to risk her remote status, has two young children and moved to be closer to their grandparents during the pandemic. Now, she's just waiting for her company to end her employment by reversing her remote work status, which the company says can be revoked at any time for any reason. She's not willing to pick up her family and move back, but she wishes she didn't have to choose. 'There's been a shift in the zeitgeist—now, it's 'We don't care about you, and you're replaceable,'' she says. 'It's like we didn't learn anything.'
Bloomberg
17-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Full Return to Office Now Required by Majority of Fortune 100
Analyzing trends in leadership, company culture and the art of career building. In the waning days of the return-to-office debates of 2024, we laid out a theory as to why this topic remained so gripping for so many (plot! pacing! characters! tension!) even as the data on where work happens suggested it was time to move on. At that point, a third of US firms were fully back in the office, a quarter were fully flexible, and 43% offered hybrid schedules, according to Flex Index.
Business Times
12-07-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Does working from home kill company culture?
'This isn't just about productivity metrics,' Dara Khosrowshahi, the boss of Uber, told employees recently, after the ride-hailing company said they should all work from the office at least three days a week. 'It's about building the culture that will drive Uber's next phase of growth.' Khosrowshahi is not the only boss to appeal to such fuzzy ideas while herding workers back through the turnstiles. In January, staff at Amazon were required to return to the pre-pandemic norm of working five days a week from the office. 'People riff on top of one another's ideas better when they're together,' Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, told the Harvard Business Review when asked about the policy. Although company culture can be a slippery concept , executives are right to worry about it. Research suggests that a company's values and norms, including those governing how employees work, behave and interact, can affect innovation, profitability and stockmarket returns. But does forcing people into the office improve a company's culture? Our analysis suggests that the answer may depend on the type that a firm is trying to instil. Bosses, by and large, claim that having people in the office full time is a cultural boon. The spontaneity that often leads to new ideas is lost when employees work from home. Collaboration suffers, too. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up A study of 61,000 Microsoft employees found that remote working in the first half of 2020 made the tech giant more 'siloed' and less 'dynamic'. It is also hard to integrate new staff when their colleagues are not there to help them settle in. However, virtually all employees say they would prefer to do at least some work at home. Mark Ma of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues found that companies that insisted on workers returning to the office after the pandemic saw employees' job satisfaction fall and turnover rise – with no improvement in company performance. To assess the link between companies' working policies and their culture, we turned first to CultureX, a research firm run by Don and Charlie Sull, a father-and-son team. CultureX supplied us with a database of nine corporate-culture indicators across some 900 firms, constructed using feedback on Glassdoor, a workplace-review website. Our second source was Work Forward, an advisory firm which publishes the Flex Index, a database tracking the remote-work policies of more than 13,000 employers. It sorts companies into three categories – full-time in the office, fully flexible and hybrid. Combining the two databases, we found that firms which insist on staff being in the office five days a week won better ratings from their employees on 'agility' – a company's ability to anticipate and respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. 'If you're in the office,' explains Charlie Sull of CultureX, 'you're going to be able to receive information much more quickly and efficiently, and respond to new circumstances in a more adaptive way.' But on other measures, firms that were strict on office time scored worse than more relaxed ones. Firms with five-day mandates received lower marks from employees for supportiveness (whether employees feel like their bosses care about them), quality of leadership, toxicity (the extent to which disrespectful behaviour is tolerated in the workplace), candour and work-life balance. (On the three other measures tracked by CultureX, the companies did not score meaningfully better or worse.) The analysis has its limitations. In particular, it could also be the case that companies which care less about supporting employees or rooting out toxic behaviour are less inclined to heed workers' pleas for more flexibility. Even so, the results are suggestive. 'Companies that really score highly on agility – NVIDIA, SpaceX, Tesla – tend to strike a deal with their employees,' says Don Sull, who is also a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Employees are offered generous pay, great career opportunities and other perks. 'But the trade-off is the work-life balance tends to be really bad.' More than five years after the pandemic, companies are still trying to find the right mix of in-person and remote work. As labour markets cool, shifting power from employees to employers, bosses may be tempted to demand more office time, claiming that it will help corporate culture. For firms that prize agility, this makes sense. But the data suggest it comes a cost. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Hindustan Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Does working from home kill company culture?
'This isn't just about productivity metrics,' Dara Khosrowshahi, the boss of Uber, told employees recently, after the ride-hailing company said they should all work from the office at least three days a week. 'It's about building the culture that will drive Uber's next phase of growth.' Mr Khosrowshahi is not the only boss to appeal to such fuzzy ideas while herding workers back through the turnstiles. In January staff at Amazon were required to return to the pre-pandemic norm of working five days a week from the office. 'People riff on top of one another's ideas better when they're together,' Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, told the Harvard Business Review when asked about the policy. CHART Although company culture can be a slippery concept, executives are right to worry about it. Research suggests that a company's values and norms, including those governing how employees work, behave and interact, can affect innovation, profitability and stockmarket returns. But does forcing people into the office improve a company's culture? Our analysis suggests that the answer may depend on the type that a firm is trying to instil. Bosses, by and large, claim that having people in the office full time is a cultural boon. The spontaneity that often leads to new ideas is lost when employees work from home. Collaboration suffers, too. A study of 61,000 Microsoft employees found that remote working in the first half of 2020 made the tech giant more 'siloed' and less 'dynamic'. It is also hard to integrate new staff when their colleagues are not there to help them settle in. However, virtually all employees say they would prefer to do at least some work at home. Mark Ma of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues found that companies that insisted on workers returning to the office after the pandemic saw employees' job satisfaction fall and turnover rise—with no improvement in company performance. To assess the link between companies' working policies and their culture, we turned first to CultureX, a research firm run by Don and Charlie Sull, a father-and-son team. CultureX supplied us with a database of nine corporate-culture indicators across some 900 firms, constructed using feedback on Glassdoor, a workplace-review website. (You can explore the data here.) Our second source was Work Forward, an advisory firm which publishes the Flex Index, a database tracking the remote-work policies of more than 13,000 employers. It sorts companies into three categories—full-time in the office, fully flexible and hybrid. Combining the two databases, we found that firms which insist on staff being in the office five days a week won better ratings from their employees on 'agility'—a company's ability to anticipate and respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. 'If you're in the office,' explains Charlie Sull of CultureX, 'you're going to be able to receive information much more quickly and efficiently, and respond to new circumstances in a more adaptive way.' But on other measures, firms that were strict on office time scored worse than more relaxed ones (see chart). Firms with five-day mandates received lower marks from employees for supportiveness (whether employees feel like their bosses care about them), quality of leadership, toxicity (the extent to which disrespectful behaviour is tolerated in the workplace), candour and work-life balance. (On the three other measures tracked by CultureX, the companies did not score meaningfully better or worse.) The analysis has its limitations. In particular, it could also be the case that companies which care less about supporting employees or rooting out toxic behaviour are less inclined to heed workers' pleas for more flexibility. Even so, the results are suggestive. 'Companies that really score highly on agility—NVIDIA, SpaceX, Tesla—tend to strike a deal with their employees,' says Don Sull (who is also a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management). Employees are offered generous pay, great career opportunities and other perks. 'But the trade-off is the work-life balance tends to be really bad.' More than five years after the pandemic, companies are still trying to find the right mix of in-person and remote work. As labour markets cool, shifting power from employees to employers, bosses may be tempted to demand more office time, claiming that it will help corporate culture. For firms that prize agility, this makes the data suggest it comes a cost.
Newsweek
09-06-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Office Attendance Is Rising but Slowly, and a Lot Has Changed
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. The intensity of the "RTO debate" seems to have cooled as perhaps a new normal sets in. Even though attendance in the office is crawling up, that growth is slowing, and the entire paradigm of how companies use their spaces and to what ends has evolved greatly. While remote work continues to expand broadly, those dreaming of a fully remote future have been upended by some core realities: people are coming back to the office and, in the right circumstances, workers of all ages and levels value some office time. Regardless of their experience, role, function, geography or personal responsibilities, employees are eager to explore opportunities for greater autonomy and flexibility, and their time in the office needs to count. "Largely, we see companies enjoying a hybrid approach of two or three days a week in the office, where employees can collaborate and learn together, while giving workers some flexibility," Kate Duchene, CEO of the HR consulting firm RGP, previously told Newsweek. "If an organization does want employees to spend more time in the physical office, workers need to feel like it is an open and safe space for positive interactions with their peers and that they are having meaningful, purpose-led collaboration that is furthering their work." It's not back to 100 percent, it probably never will be, but weekly average attendance in Class A buildings, those with high-end, recent constructions and modern amenities, typically occupied by major companies and professional services firms, is at 74.8 percent over the last four weeks in the 10 largest U.S. metro areas, according to building security company Kastle Systems' latest office attendance data. On Tuesdays, the most popular day for people to go in, that figure is up to 92.1 percent. Kastle reports that the national average peak day attendance is 62.2 percent, with Chicago, New York City and three Texas cities (Dallas, Houston, Austin) running above average. The national average was under 60 percent at the same time of year in Kastle's 2023 reporting. "We've seen it increasing steadily, but it hasn't been huge," Janet Pogue McLaurin, global director of workplace research at the architecture and design firm Gensler, told Newsweek. Across the workforce, office attendance has been tied to performance reviews and bonuses, while law firms, financial services firms and the tech industry have been announcing attendance mandates. The federal government is also implementing an expansive return-to-office mandate. While it may seem that the remote era is over—the Flex Index reports that office policy changes to "full time in office" increased from 13 percent to 24 percent in the Fortune 500—the reality is a new normal has set in, and flexibility is still on the rise. The segment of companies identifying as hybrid has grown to 43 percent of Fortune 500 firms, while 24 percent are fully remote or allow employees to choose. "I often hear 'Work from home is over' or 'Everyone is returning to the office': That's not true," Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who rose into prominence in part due to his studies on remote work well before the COVID-19 pandemic, wrote on LinkedIn. "The data shows *The Return to Office* is Over." He cites office cost savings and ease in recruiting and retention among the value drivers for businesses to keep operating in a more flexible manner. So, people are coming back to the office, but the rise has been slow, and a lot has changed, including what the offices look like and what people are doing there. Leading organizations are getting better at using the office as a place for collaboration and activities, while maintaining flexible attendance policies. Getty Images "Employers are investing in 'special events' (e.g., external speakers, cooking demonstrations, etc.) to incentivize returning to the office, with a need for suitable spaces to support these events; 43% of employers have these in place," a paper by the commercial real estate firm JLL reported in February. Many companies are reconfiguring their locations and spaces. The fact that attendance is rising does not change employees' interest in flexibility and autonomy. "Our work days vary tremendously," McLaurin said. "When we think about what employees really want, [it's] access to spaces and the agency to create their ideal work experience." As companies leverage their office space to play a role in recruiting, retention and productivity, they may be encouraged by the finding from Gensler that on a holistic level, the office needs of employees do not have significant variance across generations. "We found that there was very little variance in the ideal work experience that people wanted. It was pretty much all the same at all ages, which is really surprising," she said. "We did not see that the young generation really wants something uniquely different than what everybody wants." Different Places and Spaces In the 2019 version of the office, the majority of the space was for cubicles or desks; perhaps some senior leaders occupied offices, and McLaurin noted that the only other type of space was typically conference rooms of various sizes. Today, a new mix of spaces occupy offices, including cafés, collaboration hubs and tech-equipped conference rooms, along with an emphasis on using outdoor space. A recent study from Gensler found that beyond desks and meeting rooms, workers prioritize the following amenities most: café or food hall, coworking area, lounges and nap rooms. "It used to be that we considered those amenities," McLaurin said. "They were the additive cherry-on-the-top kind of spaces. But now we see that amenities are no longer optional. They're really an important component of creating a great workplace experience." A company's office presence, including the buildings and different cities they are located in, has always had an importance to company strategy. Typically, offices are opened to be accessible for clients, suppliers and employees, and, for a long time, companies have thought about how to equip their headquarters with amenities to keep employees happy, such as the watercooler, snacks or a gym. JLL's authors also noted that "the number of organizations reporting that they have a dedicated community or workplace experience manager on-site has risen from 23 percent to 35 percent in the past year." For companies looking to promote productivity in the workspace, Gensler identified seven main ways of working in the office and then mapped out which office amenities or features contributed best to that type of work. The seven ways of working in the office, according to Gensler. The seven ways of working in the office, according to Gensler. Gensler How different office spaces contribute to the seven modes of office work. How different office spaces contribute to the seven modes of office work. Gensler The researchers then identified which positive impacts can be credited to the office environment, finding the strongest ties were to company brand and identity, enabling people to do their best work, making people feel valued and excited to work for the company, inspiring new thinking and attracting and retaining talent. Employees also care about the environment surrounding the office, which may explain why some companies, like IBM and Marriott, have opened urban, public transport-accessible offices in vibrant neighborhoods, after spending decades in sprawling suburban campuses. The value that employees place on the office is around identity, inspiration and talent retention. The value that employees place on the office is around identity, inspiration and talent retention. Gensler "When we're working with clients, we hear two things," McLaurin said. "One is, Where is that talent and where does that talent want to be located? The other is, Where's our client and customer, and how do we stay close to that client and customer?" Those companies mentioned a desire to attract employees to that shiny new office with the help of the neighborhood—replete with walkable options for lunch, a coffee or maybe getting an errand done—as part of the attraction. "All those spaces play an important role," McLaurin said. "We have seen outside of coffee shops and restaurants, outdoor spaces is number three [among employee interests]. Right after it is medical help, then grocery store, shopping, retail and pharmacy. ... So location matters as well as the type of building that you're located in."
