It's the Brian Lair Show on WNYC. I'm Bridget Bergen, sitting in for Brian this week. Welcome back, everyone.

Now we're going to look at a new gender divide forming in the modern American workplace.

Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered offices, companies wanted their workforce to return to their desks.

While many have completely eliminated work from home policies, others implemented hybrid work,

allowing employees to choose whether or not to go into the office each day.

According to the Wall Street Journal, women are often deciding to continue working from home while their male colleagues returned to their cubicles.

Joining me now to discuss this phenomenon playing out in our workplaces is to Ping Chen,

Wall Street Journal Work and Work Culture

Reporter. Her article on this topic is titled, In America's Return to the Office,

Women are Falling Behind. Tipping, welcome to WNYC.

Thanks for having me. I started introducing the topic of a gender divide in return to work, but bring us a little

deeper into this issue. How large is America's return to office gender gap?

Sure. It is very much there. If you look at some of the government data, we can see that

among men who are working, around

29% said that they spent time working from home on an average day last year. And that's a pretty

notable 5.5% drop from the year prior. Whereas for women, the percentage saying same thing has

stayed pretty flat at around 36%.

Now, I mean, for some people, remote work isn't exactly new.

People had the option before COVID.

Is this trend a direct result of the pandemic?

Well, it's absolutely a result of the fact that during the pandemic, of course, work from home became much more of a broad cultural norm.

We have definitely seen companies trying to get folk to go back to the office.

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