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Guest Essay

What Women Really Want: Work Boundaries

Nov. 2, 2025, 1:32 a.m. ET

Credit...Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Before I became an economist studying gender, I was a junior consultant. I spent late hours working far from home, skipping meals and making it back to our hotels late into the night only to be woken by urgent emails a few hours later. After a year of exhaustion and regular illness, I got assigned to a new team and started introducing myself differently: My name is Corinne, and I eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night.

I’ve been thinking of those early consulting days as progress closing the gender wage gap has essentially stalled out and mothers are leaving the labor force in droves. The data tells me that women, and especially mothers, don’t necessarily need remote work. We don’t need so-called flexible work schedules. What we need are plain old boundaries — jobs where work stops at a set time and allows other parts of life to exist without interruption.

A 2017 paper by two economists, Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais, showed that working mothers with children under 4 would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule, and would give up an average of just 15 percent of their pay to work from home. But they would forgo almost 40 percent of their income to avoid an “employer discretion” job in which their boss sets their hours at will. The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn’t unique to them: All workers in the study — men, women, parents and nonparents alike — disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them.

Yet these jobs are a significant part of our economy. At the high end of the income range, a shift toward interactive, team-based work has created something economists call convex returns to hours. Companies earn more when one worker works 80 hours a week than when two work 40 hours each because that one worker’s knowledge and relationships are crucial. Two relatively junior employees might be interchangeable, but two law partners or consulting managers are not — creating incentives for firms to eek out more hours from each employee.

It’s a pattern the economist Claudia Goldin calls “greedy work.” In lower-income jobs, it manifests as on-demand scheduling which allows companies to set workers’ hours at will, sending them home from scheduled shifts, calling them in abruptly or shifting schedules at short notice.

These demands are especially costly to women, who still carry the majority of home and child care responsibilities despite their entry into the labor market. In my research, I’ve seen that men spend about the same amount of time cooking and cleaning as they did in the 1970s. That doesn’t change even if their female partner is the primary breadwinner — she’ll still do about twice as much housework.

Then there’s child care. While the time that fathers spend caring for their children has increased, the time mothers spend has increased even more. Mothers today spend twice as much time with their kids as their own mothers did, leaving the gender gap in child care bigger, not smaller. Parents, particularly in highly educated families, focus more on their children in the hope of securing them a better future. That creates even greater strains on their schedules.

Amid all this, I see companies throwing up their hands: It’s too hard to retain women, they seem to say. Almost two thirds of corporate leaders who mandated return-to-office policies after the pandemic saw disproportionately higher numbers of women leave their companies, a survey by one industry group found.

But women’s choices don’t back up the idea that in-office work is entirely to blame. Nursing, which can essentially be done only at the site of care, remains almost 90 percent female. Most medical students are now women, too, as are about 70 percent of physician assistants and almost 90 percent of nurse practitioners. Both occupations are growing quickly. In fact, in the past two years, nearly 40 percent of all new jobs have gone to women working in health care.

If women aren’t inherently averse to in-office work, then what is the issue? That’s where I point back to boundaries. Nursing shifts are typically rigid, often set far in advance. While hours on a given shift can be grueling, they’re also a known quantity. Even on-call time — common in the medical field — is predictable. Your phone might ring on a Saturday night, but only if it’s your assigned time to be on call.

The effect is that people can set plans with child care providers, partners, friends and family members. They can build a life outside work, knowing that they won’t be interrupted at a moment’s notice. It’s not a matter of working remotely, during which personal life and work life can seep into each other, nor of simple flexibility. It’s about a clear delineation between work and every other aspect of life.

Other industries could learn from health care. While the industry’s rigid scheduling is largely a product of necessity — hospitals must, after all, be staffed consistently — the benefits of firm scheduling policies aren’t limited to one field. Hours set in advance, with few workplace responsibilities outside those times, are a boon to anyone seeking boundaries between work and life, particularly women.

Boundaries save money — child care costs are already high enough, without needing last-minute or aftercare. They also allow the investments in children that parents value (or, for those without kids, all-too-scarce leisure time).

Companies craving in-office team culture could structure shifts predictably, with hard stops at a set time, ideally around the close of school or day care. Workers could choose to log back in remotely after dinner and children’s bedtimes, and calls could be scheduled at these less costly times. Perhaps most radically, they could consider assigned on-call shifts. Workers could rotate among themselves, being on hand to solve issues after hours at scheduled times, while having plenty of time to go “do not disturb” from work needs at other times.

If this sounds far-fetched, I’m encouraged by one health care subfield once thought to be a no-go for women: obstetric medicine. Because obstetricians were required to be on call at all hours to deliver their patients’ babies, it was once believed that mothers, who had to care for their own children, simply couldn’t do the job. In 1970, only 7 percent of OBs were women. But as those initial female doctors entered the job market, many patients preferred them. This gave those doctors a small amount of market power. They used it to organize into group practices, where multiple doctors would see a single patient — and whoever was on call when that patient went into labor would deliver the baby.

Today, over 60 percent of OBs are female. Your move, consulting.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: What Women Really Want: Work Boundaries. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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