Telework and the gender pay gap along the wage distribution

Abstract This paper examines the impact of teleworking on the gender pay gap in France using data from the French Labour Force Survey. The study explores how different frequencies of teleworking—hybrid and exclusive—affect working hours and wages for men and women and considers changes along the wage distribution. We run OLS regressions by gender and conduct an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. We extend this approach by using Recentered Influence Functions (RIF) at each decile for the analysis along the wage distribution. Our results show that teleworking increases the number of hours worked for women, leading to a reduction of the gender gap in working hours. However, telework potentially increases the hourly gender pay gap as men are rewarded more than women for teleworking. This pay disadvantage is greatest for women who telework exclusively and at the higher end of the wage distribution. Nevertheless, we find evidence that telework has the potential to reduce the gender pay gap at the lower end of the wage distribution for hybrid working models, where women benefit more than men from telework.