'Structural bias' | Racial disparities in WFH raise concerns about equity of return-to-office mandates, study finds

Racial disparities in working from home (WFH) raise concerns that return-to-office (RTO) mandates introduced since Covid will not be enforced equitably, according to new research.

The study, published in the Industrial Relations Journal, comes as the House of Lords recently announced the creation of a special inquiry committee on home-based working in the UK to assess the ways it may have exacerbated existing inequalities.

The new research finds that despite a rise in home-working across all ethnicities in the UK since before the pandemic, in 2022-23 certain groups were still less likely than others to be WFH - even after controlling for factors that might affect their access to WFH policies, such as employment sector and occupational level.

The researchers found that the “intersection of ethnicity, gender, migration and parental status all mattered” for rates of WFH: