Flexibility for Both Parents: Remote Work and the Evolution of Child Penalties

Flexibility for Both Parents: Remote Work and the Evolution of Child Penalties

Elin Sundberg (Stockholm School of Economics)

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ABSTRACT:

Can workplace flexibility reduce child penalties by helping women balance work and family? We examine this question using Swedish administrative data and the rapid adoption of remote work during COVID-19. Using a triple-difference design, we compare child penalties before and after the pandemic across occupations with differential exposure to remote work. We find that remote work failed to reduce motherhood penalties: changes in employment, hours, and wage penalties show no systematic relationship with remote work adoption. We develop a household model to clarify the mechanisms producing these null results. When a mother gains the option to work remotely, she saves commuting time but also faces a wage penalty and becomes more productive in home production. Whether she increases market work or shifts toward home production depends on which force dominates. Across heterogeneous households, these opposing responses offset to produce minimal aggregate effects. Our findings suggest that expanding access to flexibility may be insufficient to reduce motherhood penalties without changing how households divide work.

BIO:

Elin Sundberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics. She graduated from Uppsala University with a PhD in Economics in 2025. Her research lies at the intersection of labor, gender, and family economics, focusing on how career–family trade-offs and household decision-making shape gender gaps in the labor market. Her recent projects examine how workplace flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the child penalty in Sweden, as well as how mothers choose maternity clinics and how differences in care affect maternal and newborn health.