喻园管理论坛2023年第65期(总第888期)

演讲主题: Can Telework Adjustment Help Reduce Disaster-Induced Gender Gap in Job Market Outcomes?

主 讲 人: 梁   辰，康涅狄格大学商学院助理教授

主 持 人: 张意成，管理学院管理科学与信息管理系讲师

活动时间: 2023年7月17日（周一） 8:30-10:30

活动地点: 管理大楼209室

主讲人简介：

Chen Liang is an assistant professor at the operations and information management department at University of Connecticut. Her research interests focus on the future of work, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. Her research has appeared in Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and Production and Operations Management. She has received five best paper awards at major IS conferences, including the Best Paper Award at WISE, the Best Paper in Track Award at ICIS, the Best Paper Award at CSWIM, the Best Paper Award at HICSS, and the INFORMS eBusiness Best Paper Award Runner-up. She is a recipient of the prestigious NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

活动简介：

Disasters usually induce constraints that affect the work environment or work-life balance, thus having important consequences for workers' labor market outcomes (i.e., unemployment, work absence, and layoff). Unfortunately, female workers tend to be more affected by changes in external constraints (e.g., the limited availability of childcare and/or domestic services) as female workers often (or are expected to) shoulder more childcare and/or household responsibilities. As a result, disasters tend to affect female workers more due to their often higher needs/preferences for flexibility and time to cope with the changes induced by disasters, suggesting increased gender inequality during disasters. In such a case, telework adjustment has emerged as a silver lining by providing workers with higher flexibility and helping them meet their needs/preferences. This paper investigates if there is any gender difference in telework adjustment, as a response to the disaster, and whether and to what extent telework adjustment can reduce the gender inequality induced by disasters, taking the COVID-19 disaster as an example. Results show that: 1) Comparing workers in the same industry and holding the same occupation, we find that female workers' telework adjustment rate is more responsive to external constraints and is 7% higher than that of male workers. 2) Telework adjustment helps reduce the gender inequality in labor market outcomes via two means: i) the higher telework adjustment rate among female workers (which reduces gender inequality by 25.48%), and ii) the stronger marginal effect of telework adjustment on female workers (which reduces gender inequality by 31.94%). 3) Better digital infrastructure can enhance the mitigating effect of telework adjustment. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of constraints or telework, which suggests the generalizability of our results to any disaster or event that induces constraints and increases workers' needs/preferences for flexibility and time. Our study advances the literature on how information technologies can be leveraged to mitigate disaster-induced gender inequality in the labor market.