New technologies and a global pandemic have transformed contemporary work, enabling many individuals to work in remote locations alongside traditional, on-site settings. As professional work becomes increasingly untethered from physical workplaces, researchers are examining how work location influences everything from productivity and social networks to management styles and developmental opportunities.

To date, limited research has examined how work location might influence gender discrimination. In a recent paper, we asked: How does working remotely versus on-site influence women’s likelihood of experiencing discrimination?

Examples of everyday discrimination can include ignoring a woman’s contributions, making inappropriate comments or asking her to perform tasks unrelated to her job because of her gender. Any single instance of such discrimination may appear inconsequential, but the cumulative effects can be significant. When people regularly experience these offences, they become less likely to perceive their workplace as fair and become less satisfied with their jobs. Simply perceiving that one has been the victim of discrimination can have profound health and performance consequences, as well as negative ramifications for organizations, including employee turnover or legal action.

In recent work, we drew on Gender Frame Theory, which emphasizes that gender serves as a primary ‘frame’ for coordinating social behaviour. The extent to which people use gender as a frame for organizing expectations and behaviour varies with the work environment. Gender scholars and those who study virtual communication suggest that virtual settings might transmit fewer social cues that signal gender, thus reducing gender frame salience. Bringing together these streams of research, we expected to find that the gender frame would be less salient in remote work and, consequently, that women would experience less everyday discrimination.

We tested our expectations using a survey with two notable characteristics. First, we surveyed professional women who work in the same job remotely and on site. This allowed us to hold constant individual, job and organizational factors that are constant across work locations. Second, we designed a new measure of everyday gender discrimination to capture negative gendered experiences in both remote and on-site work.

Gender salience in virtual work

The existing research on virtual work indicates that gender is less salient in remote settings. In contemporary remote work environments, employees depend on tools like video conferencing and messaging apps — platforms that strip away many of the social cues found in face-to-face interactions. These tools often obscure gender signals such as physical presence, clothing style and vocal tone.

For example, in videoconferencing, participants can typically see others only from the shoulders up, restricting views of bodies that remind them of gender characteristics and limiting the prominence of nonverbal dimensions of communication, such as assertive (versus tentative) hand and arm gestures, which play an important role in enacting gender status hierarchies in face-to-face interactions.

Research on virtual meetings highlights that gender-based status influences team interactions, with higher status individuals often dominating face-to-face group interactions. However, these status differences may be less influential in virtual teams because the absence of face-to-face presence can reduce the salience of status characteristics such as gender.

Of course, social cues don’t disappear altogether in virtual communication. Interaction partners can still recall or intuit others’ status characteristics based on names or avatars. The critical difference is that virtual communication makes social cues associated with gender less salient and as, a result, interaction partners are less likely to organize their behaviour around them. Gender Frame Theory emphasizes that certain characteristics of an individual or context intersect with gender to amplify its salience. For example, people rely more or less actively on gender for coordinating behaviour, depending on an individual’s age or education, as well as contextual characteristics such as the gender composition of a group. When working on site, cues about such characteristics can be communicated readily: Individuals send and receive sensory signals through clothing and body shapes or the firmness of a handshake, as well as postures and subtle variations in voice tone. Such information is not telegraphed as readily in remote work.

Based on this research, we anticipated that characteristics conveyed primarily through nonverbal cues and sensory signals in face-to-face interactions would heighten gender salience on site; and women who experience high on-site gender salience would have more room for a noticeable reduction in discrimination when working remotely.

Age and gender can intersect in ways that amplify gender salience. In particular, being young is likely to heighten gender salience in ways that trigger everyday gender discrimination. Young women are seen as more prototypically female because they tend to have characteristics that align with stereotypical femininity (i.e. attractiveness, vitality). Indeed, young female faces are more quickly categorized as ‘woman’ than older female faces. Notably, the gendered characteristics associated with youth and femininity are communicated through physical bodies and, thus, are likely to be particularly salient on site.

Age is not only a biological marker, but a social identity achieved through interactions. In an effort to intuit others’ age and organize behaviour and expectations accordingly, people rely on cues such as dress, gestures and posture. Because these cues are more salient in person, they should activate social categorization by age and gender and, thus, more powerfully pattern behaviour during on-site versus remote work.

Because youth activates certain gender stereotypes, it is likely to encourage everyday gender discrimination. Young women in the workplace — often defined as 30 years or under — report that colleagues treat them as less credible and competent than (a) older women and (b) men. Young women are also more likely to report that colleagues treat them as less intelligent and capable.

Youth can also activate gender stereotypes that emphasize women’s sexuality, potentially prompting discriminatory expectations and behaviours. This tendency is particularly pronounced on site, where bodies are physically co-present.

Of course, other individual characteristics may heighten gender salience as well. For instance, others might view women as more or less stereotypically female based on their marital status, managerial authority or organizational tenure. Yet, as compared with age — which is communicated readily through bodily presence and presentation — these individual characteristics are less physically embodied.

Given these arguments, we anticipated that young women, as compared with older women, would experience a more pronounced difference in the likelihood of experiencing discrimination between on-site and remote work.

The gender of interaction partners

Existing research suggests that the gender composition of women’s interaction partners can powerfully shape gender salience. Women interact with a collection of individuals to complete their work, and that group has a certain gender composition.

For example, a woman might interact with women only, men only or a mix of women and men.

Although one’s occupation or industry provides an overall social framework that diffusely shapes expectations and behaviours, direct communication and engagement with interaction partners are more likely to translate into heightened gender salience and everyday gender discrimination. As a result, in our work we focused on the gender composition of women’s interaction partners.

Prior research provided good reason to suspect that gender salience is particularly pronounced on site among women who interact with all or mostly men. The heightened nonverbal features of communication that characterize on-site interactions are likely to highlight women’s out-group position relative to their male interaction partners, fuelling gender-stereotypical expectations and behaviours. These often-subconscious performance expectations shape behaviour in a self-fulfilling way: They affect the likelihood that a man, compared to a woman, will speak up and make suggestions to the group and that others will respond positively to those suggestions, ask for the person’s opinions and accept influence from the person.

Based on this research, we expected that women working predominantly with men would experience the most significant reductions in discrimination when working remotely. When on site, the gender of these women is particularly salient, increasing the likelihood of discrimination; when remote, their gender should be far less salient, leading to a marked decrease in discrimination likelihood between the two settings. In other words, women who interact with more men stand to benefit considerably from the reduction of gender salience associated with remote work.

To capture women’s experiences of everyday gender discrimination, we presented survey respondents with a sample list of discriminatory experiences that they might have had in either remote or on-site work. To our knowledge, no such list existed previously, so we developed and validated our own inventory of everyday gender discrimination experiences.

In a pilot study, we surveyed 163 full-time workers in the United States on Prolific to solicit feedback about the initial list, asking participants whether they had experienced each form of discrimination in the past month. Then, we wrote, “We are currently developing these questions for a later survey. We would appreciate any feedback you have to improve the survey questions. Thinking about your own work experience, what types of everyday gender discrimination have you experienced that are not captured in the questions above?” Participants could then respond in an open text box.

Among respondents, 18 per cent left the box blank and 61 per cent indicated that the list was comprehensive. However, 20 per cent suggested experiences not captured in our list. For example, some noted that colleagues had questioned their commitment to their job because of gendered responsibilities. One respondent wrote, “Judgment for taking sick days/parental leave/needing accommodations to account for childcare. This can be seen as not caring about work somehow, and that burden normally falls upon women.” In response to such comments, we added a new item: “Colleagues or clients make negative assumptions about your commitment to your job because of your gender.”

Finally, we revised the list to ensure that each experience could occur both on site and remotely, and that they reflected contemporary descriptions of gender discrimination. Figure One contains our final list of 11 types of everyday gender discrimination.

To examine women’s experiences with everyday discrimination, we surveyed women who work in the same white-collar jobs remotely and on site. For example, a respondent might work as an associate at a law firm, spending three days a week working from home and two days at the office. Each respondent provided two distinct sets of observations: one for remote work and one for on-site work.

For our main survey, we used the Prolific platform to solicit responses from professional women with hybrid work arrangements. We made the survey available to women aged 18 to 75 in the U.S. who indicated that they worked in professional roles, restricting invitations to those who had hybrid arrangements in the past month. In total, we collected 1,091 complete responses.

We measured whether women experienced more everyday gender discrimination in remote or on-site work as well as the conditions that moderated such location-based differences. For instance, respondents might indicate that they experienced a particular form of everyday discrimination remotely but not on site.

Our sample comprised women with diverse work experiences: respondents came from 48 states, 17 industry sectors and nine types of work roles. The typical respondent worked in a large organization with 5,000 or more employees — most often a for-profit company, was a ‘trained professional’ with a bachelor’s degree, and had worked at her organization for at least five years. Among respondents, 44 per cent were managers and 31 per cent engaged in customer- or client-facing work. The majority (87 per cent) worked full time, dividing that time nearly evenly between remote and on-site work.

In our sample, respondents were 39 years old, on average. Younger women (under 30) and older women split their time similarly between on-site and remote work. In reporting their interaction partners at work, respondents, on average, fell between working with slightly more women than men and men and women equally.

In the prior month, 34 per cent of respondents had experienced some form of everyday gender discrimination, which aligns with previous surveys. For instance, in a nationally representative survey from Pew Research, 42 per cent of women reported that they had at some point experienced gender discrimination at work. In our sample, women were more likely to report experiencing everyday gender discrimination on site versus remotely (31 versus 17 per cent).

 Across each type of gender discrimination, significantly higher proportions of women reported discrimination on site as compared with remotely. For example, nine per cent of women reported personality-related gender discrimination on site compared with four per cent remotely; and 14 per cent said they had been underestimated because of their gender on site, whereas only six per cent said the same occurred remotely.

Women who worked with only or mostly women had similar predicted probabilities of everyday gender discrimination by location: 14 per cent on site versus 12 per cent remotely. But, as the interaction partners included more men, the difference in predicted probabilities expanded to 58 per cent on site versus 26 per cent remotely. The difference in the predicted probability of experiencing everyday gender discrimination was greatest for women who work with only or mostly men, whose likelihood of on-site discrimination was also higher than that of women who work with only or mostly women (58 versus 14 per cent).

These findings aligned with our expectations that on-site gender salience is heightened among women who interact with more men and that those women stand to benefit more from the reduction of gender salience associated with remote work.

At the same time, the decrease in everyday gender discrimination because of remote work was most pronounced for younger women and those with more male interaction partners — situations in which gender salience is particularly high on site and less salient in remote work.

The key takeaway: Whereas remote work provides a degree of protection against everyday gender discrimination across the board, the magnitude of its impact varies based on a woman’s age and the gender composition of her interaction partners.

In recent years, white-collar work has transcended traditional office boundaries. With the rapid emergence of remote and hybrid work models, professionals now work in a diverse array of locations, ranging from traditional offices to homes, cafes, and co-working hubs.

In light of this evolution, it is important to be aware of workers’ experiences in various work locations. Our research reveals that location — in concert with individual and contextual characteristics — powerfully shapes the prevalence of everyday gender discrimination, a common and consequential experience in many professional women’s lives. Remote work, for its part, can serve as a refuge for many women, reducing their exposure to everyday discrimination.

This article originally appeared in the fall 2025 issue of Rotman Management magazine, summarzing the paper “Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-site Work,” which was published in Organization Science. If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to the magazine or to the Rotman Insights Hub bi-weekly newsletter.