The move to flexible working won’t liberate us all – it will push women out of the workplace

The government may be warning of a “second wave”, but a sizeable section of the population is already looking to a post-coronavirus future. Images are conjured up of a Britain, even a world, which is slower, quieter, greener and more humane.

It is a world more local than global, where neighbours look out for each other, rushed commuters are replaced by happy cyclists, motor vehicles are banished from the roads and children play in pollution-free streets.

Central to this halcyon future are projected changes in, and at, work, with the office suddenly becoming more of an optional extra than a must-have. The months of working from home (for those who could), plus the changes necessary to make an office “Covid-compliant”, have prompted a new look at the merits or otherwise of office-working.

We are now in a position where the government wants people to go back to work – which, for most, means get back to your offices so that London and other city centres do not die – and a substantial part of the population is saying “No”. As summer turns to autumn, however, that will change, and I would not mind betting that we will see a trend – and one that everyone, from government to employer to worker needs to watch out for.

There is already evidence that the pandemic and its aftermath have treated men and women rather differently. That is not the illness itself, where it is clear that men, especially older men, have been more severely affected than women. I am talking about the social effects, which could be compounded in the months, even years, to come, and where, I confidently predict, women will not come out on the winning side.

Until now, the post-pandemic forecasts from the great and the good, from economists and think tanks have focused on generational issues. The prevailing view has been that the longer-term burden will fall far more heavily on younger people in terms of jobs, prospects and wealth than on their elders. This is, by the way, a conclusion I reject.

Younger people have time to catch up; by far the worst hit will be older workers who find themselves ejected from the labour market for good, with their already capricious private pensions slashed by the printing of money needed to keep the country afloat. But that is a whole other story.

Older or younger, the biggest losers from the pandemic could be women. Before suggesting why, I would like to place some cards on the table. I am not someone who sees every question through a gender prism. Nor have I ever argued that a woman who chooses to stay at home while her children are small, rather than going out to work, is letting the sisterhood down. On the contrary, I think people should have that choice – and not only this, but that the government should make that choice easier than it is by reintroducing the choice of household, rather than individual, taxation. Families in the UK are taxed more highly than they are in almost any other developed country, which is one reason for the relatively high rate of child poverty.

Yes, I want more women in influential positions; I want equal prospects and equal pay for equal work and far more transparency to make it happen. My point is that I do not cry “Woe is us, women” at every twist and turn of government policy or the economic cycle; some things really are not feminist issues. But I am pretty sure that the effects of the 2020 pandemic are already a gender issue and will become even more of one as time goes on.

Any change will apply less to those largely lower-paid “key workers” who heroically continued going to work through the pandemic than to those, largely better-paid, professionals who were able to work from home. In this context, though, one observation – still as yet just an observation, and only from the world of academia. Although most employers across the board agree that productivity overall was far less compromised than they had feared, when it came to producing academic research, men’s productivity rose markedly, while that of women fell.

Well, well, I wonder why that might have been. From nappy-changing to home-schooling to shopping, cooking and cleaning, the home for many remains an unequal place. Even well into this century. Caring – especially unpaid caring – is largely women’s work.

Not only that, but the crucial role of childcare in enabling parents, especially mothers, to go out to work seemed to be overlooked by those ministers and others who were, admittedly, making policy under extreme stress. The appeal went out for people to return to work, even as schools remained stubbornly closed to most pupils on most days of the week. Nurseries – which, like care homes, suffer from being a patchwork of public and private provision – were mostly closed, full stop, with some now warning that they are unlikely ever to reopen.

Clearly, it is only when schools, nurseries and paid carers are back at work that everyone else can be expected to return to work, too. The government got things the wrong way round. Whether that mistake reflects the lack of women at the top of government, as some have argued, is a fair question. But anyone at the cabinet table should have figured this out. As things stand, the majority of those answering appeals to return to their offices are men.

A bigger question is whether this will still be so, even when the schools and other support services are back. Partly this depends on how many people are still employed by the autumn and how the employer deploys those it keeps on. Some are allowing people to work from home almost indefinitely, and many will surely decide to reduce their office space, with a proportion of staff continuing to work from home some or all of the time.

For many of the almost 20 million people affected, working from home has had benefits, especially if that home is pleasant and especially if it has outside space. There is the time and money gained from not commuting; more time for the family and to get to know neighbours, and a more relaxed lifestyle overall. So even as employers are re-examining the place of offices, so too are their staff, with a view to improving their work-life balance – which is all to the good.

With one caveat. From accounts of many households caught up in the gigantic social experiment that was lockdown, it is clear that, along with the time gains, men and women very quickly reverted to their traditional roles. You can debate the pros and cons of the UK model that encourages all parents to work outside the home even when their children are very young, but if – as is probable, come the autumn – a shortage of jobs and the new feasibility of working from home results in far more men going back to an office than women, then women need to watch out.

The risk is that offices once again become a men’s zone; that working from an office – now that space is scarcer – gains a new cachet, and that this is once again where the only serious ideas are generated and the decisions made. Any inclusiveness fostered by those grids of faces over Zoom will be forgotten, and it will not be that easy for women to work their way back in.

For those women who really want to work from home, that’s fine, please do. But if not, if you don’t see 1950s-style home-making as your primary thing, don’t stand for it – either from your partner or your boss. If it again becomes the norm for men to work in an office and for women to work at, or from, home, that only means that some very old battles over pay, status and prospects will have to be fought all over again.