Home-working a threat to women’s careers, says May

‘If more women [than men] are not physically present in offices ... there is a potential that they will lose out’

A CULTURE of working from home leaves women at risk of “losing out” against men, Theresa May has warned.

The former prime minister welcomed flexible working but cautioned that “out of sight can be out of mind” if women do not have regular, in-person interactions with their employers.

Mrs May, a co-founder of the conservative feminist group Women2win, recalled that her campaigning work showed middle managers had found flexible working “difficult to comprehend” before the pandemic.

In conversation with Julia Gillard, the ex-premier of Australia, for an event to mark International Women’s Day, she said: “Now everybody has found, unless they’re doing very practical, physical jobs, they’re able to work at home.

“There’s a positive to this, it can be done, so hopefully more managers will recognise [that] now. And I think we’ll see flexibility being offered for all in a way that it wasn’t previously.

“But there’s a potential negative here for women, I think, which we have to beware [of ] ... if more women use that than the men and, so, more of the women are not physically present in offices – being seen by senior management, able to have the conversations around the coffee machine – there is a potential that they will lose out.” According to the most recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, from April 2020, women were slightly more likely to work from home (47.7 per cent) than men (45.5 per cent).

Last November, a survey for The Daily Telegraph revealed only one in 10 women then working from home planned to return to the office – despite warnings from Catherine Mann, a Bank of England policymaker, that staying away may damage their careers.

During her discussion with Ms Gillard,

held by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, Mrs May criticised her “Maybot” nickname she was given as prime minister.

She found it “frustrating” and said: “I was always just trying to be as accurate as possible and be as clear as possible ... that to me, was about being more professional. Somehow a lot of people didn’t want ‘the professional’, they wanted something else.”

She claimed interviewers had “always wanted me to say that I’d cried”.