Title

Work-From-Home Revolution: Enhancing Women’s Participation in STEM

Abstract

Women remain persistently underrepresented in STEM occupations despite sustained organizational efforts to improve retention and gender diversity. In this context, we examine whether increased work-from-home (WFH) opportunities raise young women’s participation in STEM roles. Leveraging data from IPUMS-CPS, SWAA, and job postings, and drawing on theories from labor economics and organizational strategy, we implement a Difference-in-Differences design that exploits unanticipated occupation-level variation in WFH adoption induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that high WFH adoption increases the probability of STEM employment among young women by 2.43 percentage points, a 13.6 percent increase relative to the pre-pandemic baseline. The effect is robust to various clustering levels, treatment intensity definitions, matched samples, and other validity checks. The results strongly indicate that the effect operates through reduced skill loss, enabled by increased labor market attachment under WFH adoption. Moreover, the impact varies across STEM subfields and industries and rises with the intensity of WFH adoption. As such, these findings identify WFH as a scalable organizational strategy for improving female retention and advancing DEI in high skill occupations.