How Remote Work Became a Lifeline for Women in STEM — And Why It's Now Under Threat

Despite progress over the past decades, women in STEM fields continue to face an uphill struggle, including salary discrepancies, underrepresentation, gender bias, existing structural obstacles, and increased career-related hardships. Recent research shows that working from home (WFH) owing to the pandemic expanded pathways for women via enabling online learning and credentialing, and creating inclusive hiring practices.

According to the World Economic Forum (2023), between 2019 and 2023, the share of women’s enrollment in online science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professional certificates increased from 25% to 35%. There are some insights provided by previous literature that show the shift to WFH boosted women’s participation in STEM and other related technical fields jobs — with measurable gains in the workforce.

These gains were supported by studies showing that remote work created more accessible STEM careers for women, improving retention and diversity in these fields. For example, WFH opportunities increased women’s STEM employment probability by 2.43 percentage points (a 13.6% rise) relative to pre-pandemic levels.

Yet these gains may now be at risk. Recent findings reveal that as organizations reinstate return-to-office (RTO) policies, workforce participation patterns are shifting. Recent work by Baylor University (2025), using over 3 million employee profiles stemming from 54 large technology and financial firms in the S&P 500, found that after RTO mandates were enforced, the turnover rate among female employees rose to nearly three times the rate observed for male employees. Moreover, women who left companies under RTO policies took lateral or even lower-ranked positions elsewhere, suggesting that flexibility and autonomy outweighed title or pay in their career decisions.

Importantly, even with reference to previous literature, issues remain underexplored within the context of how RTO mandates have shaped women’s experiences in the workforce. Research on RTO and WFH policies in relation to women’s participation in the STEM workforce remains surprisingly limited in scope.

The absence of detailed, gender-disaggregated data leaves critical questions unanswered:

• To what extent do RTO mandates influence women’s career trajectories, particularly in STEM and other technical fields where representation remains uneven?
• What is lost when WFH flexibility disappears?

Drawing from peer-reviewed research and large-scale industry surveys, SWE conducted this systematic review to understand how RTO policies are reshaping the workforce — and whose progress may be most at risk.

The following infographic provides a high-level view of our findings.

Several insights stem from our findings:

• First, in-person work environments may improve visibility and informal networking among women. However, under RTO mandates, women who continue WFH due to caregiving, health, or other responsibilities experience disadvantages, such as reinforcing bias and proximity privilege. These dynamics may unintentionally favor those with greater ability to be physically present, thereby widening existing gender gaps in career advancement.
• Second, the impact varies across organizational contexts and individual circumstances, as some women choose to either drop out of the labor force or take a pay cut to be allowed to work from home.
• Lastly, although a substantial body of literature examines the evolving nature of RTO, we find that RTO mandates are widely discussed in public and organizational discourse, but few studies have quantitatively measured RTO’s impact.

Overall, this underscores an urgent need for more rigorous, data-driven research to better understand the evolving and complex magnitude stemming from RTO mandates. Our findings align with this theme, but we believe that future research should look less at the loss of flexibility under RTO mandates and more about what is gained when flexibility exists — and what and who is at risk when it disappears.