Interest in Working Remotely: Is Gender a Factor?Show others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement / [ed] Dietmar Pfahl, Javier Gonzalez Huerta, Jil Klünder, Hina Anwar, Springer, 2025, Vol. 15452, p. 156-171Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer, 2025. Vol. 15452, p. 156-171
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), ISSN 0302-9743, E-ISSN 1611-3349 ; 15452
Keywords [en]
Empirical study, Gender, Hybrid work, Remote work, Software engineering, WHF, Work-from-home, Computer aided software engineering, Human engineering, Human resource management, Population statistics, Software testing, Contingency table, Descriptive statistics, Empirical studies, Individual choice, Remote working, Fintech
National Category
Software Engineering Work Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-27328DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-78386-9_11ISI: 001423664600011Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85211921052ISBN: 9783031783852 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-27328DiVA, id: diva2:1923719
Conference
25th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2024, Tartu, Dec 2-4, 2024
Part of project
WorkFlex, Knowledge FoundationSERT- Software Engineering ReThought, Knowledge Foundation
Funder
Knowledge Foundation, 20220047Knowledge Foundation, 201800102024-12-302024-12-302025-09-30Bibliographically approved