Does feasibility explain the unequal development of working from home?

Using rich historical survey data on job tasks and machine learning techniques, we study which jobs can be moved from the office to home over three decades in France. The share of jobs with task content compatible with working from home has increased steadily from 14 % in 1991 to 45 % in 2021. At the same time, actual Working From Home (WFH) remained limited to less than one-fifth of its full potential before the COVID-19 crisis and is still below that level in 2021. The growth of WFH is largely unrelated to the evolution of job tasks, implying that the main obstacles to WFH have not been technical constraints. Low-skilled employees in particular have been performing tasks compatible with teleworking for a long time, but they were barely teleworking before the COVID-19 crisis and remained still below 50 % of their full potential during it. This pattern is likely mostly explained by the cost to managers of supervising low-skilled remote workers and managerial trust in employees. It implies that the well-known large inequality in access to WFH along the earnings distribution cannot be attributed only to feasibility constraints and is potentially inefficient.