Agnieszka Postepska receives NWO grant for project on hybrid work and the gender gap in the labor market

Associate professor Agnieszka Postepska has received a grant of € 50,000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a project on hybrid work and the gender gap in the labor market.

The project titled ‘Can hybrid work help close the labor market gender gaps?’ aims to analyze the effects of the increase in hybrid work on women's labor market outcomes, focusing on weekly hours and wages. In doing so, Agnieska Postepska, (associate professor within FEB’s Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance) hopes to uncover a new pathway toward a gender-equal labor market.

The focus of the project on hybrid work is especially relevant, since the work-from-home experiment initiated by the Covid pandemic has facilitated remote work and changed the work environment worldwide. Employers are increasingly willing to offer their employees the possibility of continuing to work remotely, and policymakers recognize the potential of hybrid work to alleviate labor market shortages by enabling participation and longer working hours for workers who combine work with informal care.

The effect of flexibility on women's labor market outcomes

Postepska is an expert in labor economics and her research projects often focus on gender (inequality) in the labor market. One of her current project for instance studies gender-stereotypical labor market behavior and another aims to explain Dutch women’s labor market patterns, specifically with regard to part-time work. Postepska looks forward to working on her new project. “Hybrid work is not a new concept, but it has increased in popularity after the Covid pandemic. In fact, the large-scale work-from-home experiment would probably not have happened without the lockdowns. Many research projects have documented the detrimental effect of the pandemic on women’s labor market status. However, these papers analyze data from the pandemic and effectively identify the effects of the lockdowns on women's labor market outcomes. It is not surprising that they predominantly find negative effects. I propose a new approach. I will abstract from the detrimental effects of the lockdowns by analyzing post-pandemic data. This allows me to identify the effect of the increased possibility of hybrid work instead. This creates a unique opportunity to gain insights into the role that more flexibility in the workplace has on women's labor market outcomes.”

The NWO Open Competition

With the NWO Open Competition-SSH, NWO Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choosing without any thematic constraints. The aim of the Open Competition – SSH is to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem.

For more information, please contact Agnieszka Postepska.