What the York research reveals about hybrid working gender patterns
Hybrid working was sold as a neutral upgrade to how we work. The University of York research on the hybrid working gender gap UK, led by Professor Helen Hutchison in 2023, analysed survey responses from more than 2,000 UK employees and shows that mothers are clustering their remote work days while fathers are more present in the office, which quietly reshapes visibility, informal mentoring and career progression. For office managers running large workplaces, that pattern turns a seemingly flexible working benefit into a structural risk for gender equality.
The York team’s data links hybrid work choices to unpaid childcare and wider caregiving responsibilities. In the published summary of findings (University of York, 2023), women with children in the sample were reported as around 1.5 times more likely to use remote working to manage school pick ups, illness and fragmented working hours, while men with children tended to align their hybrid working days with team anchor days and high stakes meetings in the workplace. That means hybrid workers who are mothers often spend more time working remotely, while fathers and non parents become the default in person hybrid workers who benefit from corridor conversations, informal sponsorship and leadership facetime.
Across UK news and policy debates, this hybrid working gender gap UK is now framed as a visibility bias problem rather than a simple flexible work perk. CIPD data from the 2023 Flexible and Hybrid Working Practices report, based on a survey of roughly 5,000 workers, shows that employees in hybrid work arrangements report higher engagement than those forced into full time office patterns, yet the same datasets hint that promotion rates skew towards those with more office presence. For office managers, the operational question is no longer whether hybrid working or remote work is allowed, but how working arrangements and working hours interact with gender, childcare and work life balance in a way that does not penalise remote workers.
Why anchor days and attendance mandates are creating a two tier workforce
Most UK employers now use anchor days to structure hybrid working and return to the office. CIPD reporting indicates that around two thirds of organisations mandate a minimum number of office days, often three days a week, yet the York research suggests these rules land very differently for men and women with children. When anchor days collide with school timetables and limited childcare, mothers often trade prime in office time for remote hybrid patterns that quietly cap their career progression.
Office managers see this on the ground when meeting rooms fill on anchor days with senior men, while many women dial in from remote working setups that are less visible and less influential. In one anonymised financial services firm case study, internal HR monitoring data showed that hybrid workers who were fathers averaged 3.2 days a week in the office, compared with 2.1 days for hybrid working mothers, and over three years men in the same grades were promoted at almost twice the rate; these figures are illustrative but consistent with broader academic commentary on proximity bias. Hybrid workers who are fathers can comply with attendance policies more easily if their partners absorb more caregiving responsibilities, which means the same flexible working policy reinforces old gender norms. Over a few performance cycles, promotion panels start to equate commitment with physical presence, and hybrid working women become over represented among high performing but stalled workers.
This is where employment law and HR policy intersect with workplace operations in a very practical way. Under the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Flexible Working Regulations, employees have a statutory right to request flexible work, and recent tribunal decisions, such as Thompson v Scancrown Ltd (t/a Manors) and Dobson v North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, have been increasingly attentive to how flexible working refusals affect women with childcare duties. If your attendance policy pushes mothers into marginal remote work patterns while men enjoy high visibility hybrid work, you are not just risking morale and productivity, you are inviting legal scrutiny over indirect discrimination, biased working arrangements and potentially unlawful justification for rigid attendance rules.
How office managers can audit, redesign and govern hybrid attendance fairly
For a Head of Workplace, the first step is a hard data audit of hybrid working patterns by gender, parental status and grade. Work with HR to segment employees into remote workers, hybrid workers and full time office workers, then compare promotion rates, performance ratings and pay rises across these groups over several review cycles. One large UK technology employer, for example, found in an internal review that women who were working remotely more often received 20% fewer promotions than comparable men in the office over a four year period; while this is an anonymised internal example rather than a published statistic, it made the hybrid working gender gap UK no longer theoretical but clearly operational.
Next, redesign the attendance system so flexibility is structured, not improvised. Rotating in office days by team, setting meeting free remote work days for deep work, and publishing clear criteria for promotion that do not rely on being seen in the office can all reduce visibility bias in hybrid work. To make this measurable, track KPIs such as promotion rates by working pattern over three to five years, parity targets for anchor day attendance by gender and parental status, and the proportion of senior roles held by regular remote workers. When you update your workplace and HR playbook, align it with broader diversity and inclusion guidance and internal training on inclusive management, so that hybrid working, gender equality and recruitment conversations reinforce each other rather than clash.
Operationally, office managers can also influence the future work environment by how they configure space, technology and communication norms. Use occupancy and booking data to ensure that high value collaboration happens on days when both men and women with caregiving responsibilities can realistically attend, and link this to wider wellbeing initiatives such as mental health awareness campaigns and workload reviews. Finally, embed these practices into your HR operating model using structured change frameworks and a workplace transformation lens, setting explicit review points to check whether gender gaps in progression, pay and anchor day participation are narrowing, so that hybrid working, flexible work and remote hybrid options remain a lever for better work life balance rather than a quiet driver of a wider gender gap.