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Interest in Working Remotely: Is Gender a Factor?

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15452))

  • 206 Accesses

Abstract

Background: Modern workplaces have irreversibly changed their attitudes toward remote working, allowing different degrees of remotely working. Decisions about the influence of restricted remote working and mandatory office presence often raise the question of disproportional impact on different genders. Aim: Our aim is to achieve a better understanding of whether WFH has a gender-segregated motivation and what other factors predict individual choices to work onsite or remotely. Method: We report results from a company-wide survey conducted in NorBank, a Norwegian fintech company. The data is analyzed using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, Chi-Square test of association along with post hoc tests. We illustrated the results by using diverged chart bars. Results: The results show that gender differences among software engineers are negligible and insignificant. Further, software engineers work more remotely than employees in other departments. We also found that engineers without managerial responsibilities are less at the office, and those who live further to their job, tend to work more remotely. With respect to preferences to work remotely, we found that younger engineers choose to work at the office more often than the senior engineers. Conclusions: We found that the strongest predictor of the degree of remote working is not the gender but commute time and role. This also means that any analysis of general populations (as the analysis of all employees at NorBank) shall be approached with care because it may lead to flawed conclusions due to the different distributions of gender and roles in different departments.

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Acknowledgment

We thank NorBank for their engagement in our research. The work is supported by the KKS foundation through the WorkFlex project (grant 2022/0047) the S.E.R.T. Research profile project (grant 2018/010) at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), and by the Research Council of Norway through the 10XTeams project (grant no. 309344).

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, CERIS, Örebro University School of Business, 701 82, Örebro, Sweden

    Panagiota Chatzipetrou

  2. Blekinge Institute of Technology, 371 79, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Darja Smite, Nils Brede Moe & Eriks Klotins

  3. SINTEF, 7034, Trondheim, Norway

    Darja Smite, Anastasiia Tkalich & Nils Brede Moe

Authors
  1. Panagiota Chatzipetrou
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  2. Darja Smite
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  3. Anastasiia Tkalich
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  4. Nils Brede Moe
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  5. Eriks Klotins
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Panagiota Chatzipetrou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Dietmar Pfahl

  2. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Javier Gonzalez Huerta

  3. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jil Klünder

  4. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Hina Anwar

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Chatzipetrou, P., Smite, D., Tkalich, A., Moe, N.B., Klotins, E. (2025). Interest in Working Remotely: Is Gender a Factor?. In: Pfahl, D., Gonzalez Huerta, J., Klünder, J., Anwar, H. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78386-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78386-9_11

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-78386-9

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