As Clear as Black and White: Racially Disparate Concerns Over Career Progression for Remote Workers Across Racial Faultlines

With increasing complexity in the evolving structure of work in organizations, employees’ preferences for working from home (WFH) relative to working on-site can lead to systematic differences in perceived career implications. An emerging tension associated with WFH versus work-at-work is whether this locational divide is associated with concerns over career progression, especially among racial minorities. Here, we seek to determine whether Black employees, relative to their White counterparts, have more concerns over career progression relating to WFH compared with their on-site colleagues. From a sample of employees in the May 2021 cross-section of the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA), we find that relative to higher (lower) income White employees, higher (lower) income Black WFH employees have significantly higher (lower) concerns over career progression than their on-site counterparts. These findings speak both to the nontrivial choices employees may be forced to make as the structure of work continues to evolve and consequences for racial inequality.

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