Thanks to the omicron variant, many of us are working from home once again. This new-found flexibility is often a benefit, but as our 2020 report Resilience and Recovery found, it has been both a blessing and a curse for female founders.

In 2020, lockdowns and school closures negatively impacted female entrepreneurs far more than their male counterparts. Women were more likely to lose their jobs. Research from America found that women were more likely to be working at the kitchen table, where they were likely to be disturbed by family members, while their male partners took the home office. With schools shut and working home becoming the norm, the number of chores at home increased, and this burden fell disproportionately on women who also had to homeschool children and care for older relatives. During lockdown, British women have taken responsibility for two-thirds more childcare than men and they have also cut down their paid hours. Before the pandemic, mothers worked 80% of the hours that fathers did. During lockdown this dropped to 70%.

But it is not all bad news. The pandemic has ushered in lots of changes to how we live and some of these new changes may help female founders. It looks as though working from home is here to stay. Only one fifth of businesses intend to have all their workers in the office five days a week.

Women are half as likely to find working from home difficult. Remote work offers many advantages in terms of flexibility, which is very useful in the context of managing childcare responsibilities. Instead of having to pay for full time childcare, mothers may be able to keep their young children at home while working. Flexible working will also make it easier to manage a school run around other commitments. As a result, we may see fewer women dropping out of the workforce when they have children which means they will continue to build skills, rise higher in their profession, and start successful businesses.

Women are more likely to have short commutes once they have children and this mostly takes effect about four years after the birth of their first child. So there appears to be a clear causal link with the school run. The impact is that it curtails womens’ ability to succeed in careers which require people to live in or commute to expensive cities. The life sciences and FinTech, due to being based in places like London, Oxford, and Cambridge, particularly suffer from this.

If employers only expect employees to come in once a week, that makes it much easier to commute for up to an hour, with support networks such as relatives or other parents supporting with the school run. If working from home remains the status quo, we should expect mothers to stay in these professions at higher rates.

2022 promises to be an exciting year for the Female Founders Forum. We’re going to kick off the year with a series of regional roundtables.

These are going to be in the North West, Yorkshire, Wales, London and the South West. While we are doing the North West Roundtable virtually, we are hoping to do the rest in person, Covid guidance permitting. We will be building on the issues highlighted in our latest Female Founders Forum report Inspiring Innovation.

We are going to bring together local policy makers and the UK’s female founders to discuss the four barriers holding back female entrepreneurs in high-growth, high-impact industries, and what we can do to break them down. So we will be discussing how to close the funding gap, increase the number of girls and women in STEM, give girls and women better role models and mentors, and how to close the chore gap between men and women.

You can find all the events on our website.