Who Are Working from Home Parents in China?: Comparing Working from Home Mothers and Fathers

Working from home (WFH) has increasingly been adopted globally as a family-friendly arrangement that enables employees with greater family responsibilities to reconcile work and family demands. However, little is known about which parents take up WFH in the Chinese context. Using nationally representative pre-pandemic data from the China General Social Survey 2015, this paper examines the sociodemographic determinants of parents working from home in China, with particular attention to gendered patterns among mothers and fathers. The results show no statistically significant gender difference in the overall likelihood of WFH among parents. However, the sociodemographic determinants of WFH show different patterns among mothers and fathers. Specifically, Chinese mothers are more likely to WFH when they are engaged in non-standard employment arrangements and do not live with grandparents, whereas Chinese fathers are more likely to WFH when they are employed in the agricultural sector and hold more traditional gender role attitudes. A positive but weak association is observed between the number of children and mothers’ likelihood of WFH, while no such association is found among fathers. In addition, unlike in Western contexts, WFH uptake among Chinese parents is not found to be concentrated among more advantaged groups.