Totally agree, both my wife and I were able to WFH when the kids were young and as a Dad I got to spend so much time with them that I wouldn't have otherwise if I had been in a 5 day WFO role. Gymnastics/dance classes, school pickups and drop offs, play dates etc etc. It's the small stuff, but so many memories.

WFH meant my wife didn't have to quit her job and was able to continue to advance her career.

Now it meant catching up on work in the evenings after the kids were asleep, but it was totally worth it. With both of us being able to WFH, we could schedule things so that each of us was where we needed to be work-wise for meetings/calls etc.

Elizabeth Barber's Women's Work points out that for centuries (millennia even), textile work was both economically valuable and fit the criteria for caregiving: interruptible and capable of being done at home.

Then the industrial revolution happened, and textiles became cheap...

I agree in some ways but for me, probably the biggest potential benefit is that it dramatically improves the ability to return to work after a career break for maternity or family caring responsibilities. We know that this difficulty is one of the biggest reasons we don't see more senior women in many careers; larger corporates have started putting in places returners programmes specifically because of this.

The "old" way to deal with this was part time working. But in many careers the truth is that returning part time simply means being paid 80% or 60% of a full time wage but with close to full time hours and responsibilities. WfH 3 days a week opens up the possibility to manage a full time role together with some care responsibilities when returning. In that way it's potentially a huge change for the better.

No, it affects women more because they mostly do the cushy office jobs that can be done remotely, while men are out in the field destroying their backs and getting electrocuted. Feel free to look up the gender quotas in construction or factory work.

How about women getting puked on by patients and yelled at by doctors as nurses? I get your point and it's kinda true, but it's not as clear cut as you're making it sound.

We can go back and forth about this. I'll counter with garbage collectors (chiefly men) having to deal with liquid trash, you'll talk about female secretaries having to deal with harassment, I'll talk about emergency frontliners having to deal with the worst of society, and so on.

And we see the similarity here: they're all relatively low-wage jobs.

The comparison here shouldn't be between high-paid jobs (doctor) and low-paid ones (nurse), rather between low-paid jobs and other low-paid jobs.

The bottom line is that those with lower-wage jobs will be the ones having to deal with the worse things, but generally-speaking women tend to take up the less dangerous, more comfortable low-wage jobs. Think teachers, nurses, secretaries against soldiers, police officers, construction workers.

> tend to take up the less dangerous, more comfortable low-wage jobs. Think teachers, nurses, secretaries against soldiers, police officers, construction workers.

> less dangerous, more comfortable

I don't think a modern school or hospital is more comfortable or safe than a squad car. To be completely fair the difference between a police officer and a nurse and teacher is that the former can defend himself and claim he "was afraid for his life" while the latter can't.

> but generally-speaking women tend to take up the less dangerous, more comfortable low-wage jobs

"Comfortable" is hard to define and I see it easy to argue that jobs such as nursing, with the stress, insane schedules and such, is far less comfortable than equivalent jobs. It's such a subjective term and the different types of comfort vs stress means that arguing about it seems mostly pointless.

However, it's pretty clear that more dangerous jobs are far more likely to be traditionally male roles.

A skilled welder can make more money than a secretary (not to mention a logger or oil worker), but the secretary can probably work from home and the welder can not. At the end of the day, the __vast__ majority of those dirty physical jobs are done by men, whereas women mostly do more comfortable office work, regardless of pay.

The vast majority of dirty and dangerous jobs are done by men, even if there are many women-dominated service jobs as well. For every nurse there are 10 construction workers. Servers and retail are probably about equal. Numbers wise it is extremely obvious that women will be more able to take advantage of remote work, especially when you factor in their much higher education attainment (50% higher college graduation) and tendency to do part time.

Please don't take HN threads into gender flamewar hell, or any flamewar hell, or any flamewar at all. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36469006.