Remote three or more days, women are promoted less than men on the same schedule. Here's the workaround.
Women who work from home three or more days a week are promoted less often than men on the identical schedule. That finding comes from the 2025 Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey and LeanIn, and the phrase "identical schedule" is the part that deserves your attention.
The common explanation for remote work and advancement is visibility. Stay at home and you get overlooked. Were the explanation simply that remote staff get overlooked, then all of them would face the same odds of being bypassed for promotion. Looking at the data, that conclusion does not hold up. Men on the same three-day arrangement do better than women on it, so the penalty isn't attached to working remotely. The penalty lands specifically on women who do their jobs from a distance. Decision-makers in the room read the same calendar in two different ways.
Where the figure originates, in the Baltimore data that feeds this chapter
Since 2015, the Women in the Workplace study has followed American companies each year, pairing corporate records with what employees report in surveys, including staff in Baltimore, Towson and Columbia. The 2025 edition compared promotion outcomes by work arrangement and gender and identified the gap among people remote three or more days. It also found that 19 percent of companies had cut back on remote or hybrid work. The study is observational, so it can't pinpoint why a woman at home is interpreted differently from a man at home, and it can't rule out that women and men pick remote work for different reasons. What it does show is that the schedule alone doesn't account for the gap, and that "just come in more" doesn't fully solve it.
How it appears on the ground
Imagine a talent review in a Baltimore office tower, or on a video call with colleagues in Columbia and Towson. Two directors are being considered, and both work from home three days a week. When his name comes up, someone says, "He's heads-down on the platform work, that's why we don't see him much." When hers comes up, someone says, "She's been less visible this year." The calendar is the same. His absence reads as focus. Hers reads as drift. Everyone gathered here, from Catonsville to Essex, means well. They fill the gap with the story they already carried, and the story they carried about her involved children, whether or not she has any.
What this translates to for someone working in Central Maryland
If you work remotely and feel uneasy about it, that unease is reasonable, and the answer isn't simply to commute in more often. Showing up in the office doesn't alter the story a room tells about your absence. What changes it is giving people a different story to repeat, one about results, before anyone has to guess. The visibility that counts isn't your face in a hallway. It's your work showing up in the sentence someone speaks when your name is raised.
Next steps to take
Let people see what you produce, but avoid staging it for an audience. Every two weeks, send your manager a short note of three lines covering what shipped and what's next, so that when your name comes up, the person speaking already has a sentence ready. Then ask one direct question: "If I were in the office five days, what would you see that you're not seeing now?" Specific answers are useful, and vague ones tell you the judgment was never really about the calendar.
In your last review, here in Central Maryland, who spoke for you when your name was raised, and which facts did they actually have in hand?