As more companies roll out return-to-office (RTO) mandates, they may be unknowingly hitting the brakes on one of the most promising avenues to close the gender wage gap: workplace flexibility. For employers committed to excellence, innovation, and high-performing cultures, now is the time to recognize that flexible work isn’t a perk—it’s a strategic lever for attracting and retaining top talent, especially women, and making measurable progress on pay equity.
FlexProfessionals, in our work with hundreds of employers, has seen firsthand how flexibility can be a game-changer for women and the companies that hire them.
Flexibility Isn’t Just a Benefit—It’s a Pay Gap Equalizer
Decades of research, especially that of Nobel-prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin, confirm that the primary driver of the persistent gender wage gap in the United States is no longer education, nor occupational choice, nor social norms. It is disruptions in women’s careers—often due to caregiving responsibilities. From stepping back to raise children to caring for aging parents, women are far more likely than men to reduce hours, take career breaks, or drop out of the workforce entirely. These interruptions compound over time, derailing career advancement and salary growth.
Women now outpace men in higher education and represent more than half of the college-educated labor force, yet they still earn about 18% less than their male peers in prime working years. That number climbs to just over 24% for college-educated women.
What many working women believe, and studies show is that normalizing workplace flexibility is crucial to achieving pay equity. Many of our clients are using hybrid and remote work not only to keep their top performers advancing but to close their own internal pay gaps. And through FlexProfessionals’ 15-year history curating flexible jobs, we have helped thousands of professionals, 90% of whom are women, stay in the workforce or return more rapidly after a career break, thus reducing the time away from work that drives much of the gender wage gap.
Employers Can’t Afford to Ignore the Business Case
Today’s labor market is tightening. Baby boomers are retiring en masse (in 2025, we hit “Peak 65,” where more than 4.1 million Americans are turning 65 each year through 2027), birth rates are at historic lows, and immigration can’t fill the gap—especially in white-collar sectors. Our country is also facing severe talent shortages in critical fields such as accounting (where 75% of CPAs are at retirement age, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and vital industries like healthcare. Employers simply can’t afford to sideline qualified talent, especially women.
Yet, rigid RTO mandates risk doing just that. FlexProfessionals has watched employers lose out on exceptional female candidates because of rigid requirements for five days in-office. Conversely, they’ve worked with businesses—especially in industries that have historically struggled to hire and retain women (e.g., sectors of financial services, defense, and tech)—to reassess their in-office policies and unlock access to high-caliber women, including those returning from career breaks.
Several mid-sized asset and wealth management clients of FlexProfessionals are prime examples. Facing a shifting market, with an expected transfer of $30 trillion in financial assets from baby boomer wealth to surviving female spouses and children over the next decade, these firms recognize the need to increase the number of women in their organizations, especially in client-facing advisory roles. They have restructured their workplaces to allow hybrid work and are pulling more women into senior-level roles. In just a year, we helped one firm fill over a dozen positions at director-level or higher with women, many recruited from competitors offering less flexibility.
RTO Mandates Could Set Us Back a Decade
The pandemic revealed the outsized impact that flexibility has for working women. During the crisis, women—particularly mothers—left the workforce at 3 to 4 times the rate of men. But when flexible models became widespread, women surged back, led by a dramatic increase in women with young children. Prime-age women’s labor participation hit a historic high of 78% in late 2024.
Now, as RTO mandates roll out, that progress is in jeopardy.
If companies revert to inflexible norms, they risk widening the very wage gap they seek to close. They will squander the major gains we’ve made in being able to effectively implement flexibility post-pandemic. They’ll also risk losing their edge in competing for critical talent in an economy with a rapidly aging population that will increasingly challenge not just women, but most employees, to take on caregiving responsibilities.
What Employers Can Do Today
- Audit Your Talent Pipeline: Where are you losing women? Is pay equity an issue? Are key roles going unfilled because of rigid work requirements? Are women leaving your organization to go to more flexible employers?
- Tailor and Tune: Do you have blanket in-office policies, or have you customized flexible work options around specific roles? Collaboration requirements, customer-facing demands, measurability, and mentoring needs are job attributes that should drive decisions about the right level of flexibility in a given role. While some jobs are done more effectively in office, many roles, such as mid-to-senior level accounting, marketing, HR, and analytics, can be highly productive in hybrid models. Consider implementing flexibility on a team or position basis, empowering groups to find the balance that works.
- Capitalize: Once you develop the business case for workplace flexibility in your organization, make sure you capitalize on its power. Start by being intentional in communicating internally the expected benefits of your flexibility policies and integrating them into the corporate culture. Establish ways to identify and adjust where flexible policies may be driving unintended outcomes (e.g., less productive meetings, scheduling frustrations, etc.). Finally, ensure you highlight and market your flexible work environment externally to enhance your brand as a top place to work.
- Partner Strategically: Organizations like FlexProfessionals can help you access top-tier professionals who value or need flexibility and may leave current employers for a more flex-friendly employer.
Flexibility is good for business. It reduces turnover, expands your talent pool, improves employee engagement, and helps companies keep pace in a rapidly evolving labor market.
As we recognize Boston’s Equal Pay Day, we urge employers to see flexible work as not only an important recruiting and retention tool but also as one of the most powerful strategies we have to close the gender wage gap and build stronger, more resilient organizations. Let’s not allow RTO policies to undo the progress we’ve worked so hard to achieve.
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