Men are more game for working from home or on the go than women, according to a report released this week by Mori.
Almost half of male managers are currently working from home (45 per cent), according to the report, while the same is true for less than a third of all female managers (28 per cent).
Sandi Mann, a work psychologist from the University of Central Lancashire, attributed the figures to differences between male and female approaches to working. “Women have struggled for so long to break into the male-dominated office world [that they] are reluctant to give it up,” Mann said.
Women still see the home more as a domestic domain than a venue for working. Men, on the other hand, are less susceptible to the distractions of family, pets and Internet shopping than women, the report claims.
Almost half (46 per cent) of respondents cited dealing with household matters such as children and friends as the key distraction of working at home.
Women are also more likely to miss their colleagues if they forego the office environment, according to the research.
Not only do they feel less comfortable about remote methods of working than men, but women are less open-minded about the productiveness of staff who work from home than men are.
While 41 per cent of male managers said they have no preference for where their employees work from, so long as the work gets done, only 22 per cent of female managers expressed the same view.
Women managers are also more likely to deny the job satisfaction that comes with having flexibility to work from home. Only 24 per cent of them said the flexibility to choose the location of work contributed to improved job satisfaction, compared with 40 per cent of male managers.