A recent New York Times opinion piece suggests remote work is bad for workers’ mental health.
In the article, the authors cited their research published in Science, demonstrating that since the pandemic, workers in remote jobs spent an additional hour alone per workday and more days entirely alone, as well as experienced decreased after-work socializing. It also showed a simultaneous increase in mental distress.
While these findings should not be ignored, the conversation about remote work tends to swing between two extremes: WFH is bad, as the Times piece argues, or WFH is good, supported by research like a Personnel Psychology study claiming remote workers have better outcomes than their office-based colleagues.
Here’s what both sides of the coin miss: Workers aren’t a homogeneous group. Women in particular experience work differently because of factors like unequal caregiving responsibilities and invisible labor.
We shouldn’t simply be asking whether remote work is bad for mental health. That binary framing ignores a more crucial question: Who might remote work not work for—and who is it saving?
Mental Health Is More Than One Variable
The discussion about remote workers’ mental health is often narrowed to loneliness and lack of social connection, as demonstrated by the Times piece.
But mental health also includes stress, anxiety, burnout, sleep, recovery, emotional regulation, access to healthcare and therapy and work-life integration, among other things. One metric shouldn’t outweigh all of the others—especially when it’s being used as a case against remote work.
Part of the problem is that the conversation around remote work often equates isolation with autonomy. These are different psychological concepts—and they’re not mutually exclusive. Someone can be autonomous and still feel connected to their colleagues. They can go to an office and still lack a sense of community at work.
We Need To Distinguish Social Stress From Logistical Stress
Not all stress is created equal.
Loneliness, reduced spontaneous interaction and fewer casual conversations are forms of social stress. But constant rushing, commuting, childcare logistics, cognitive overload and schedule fragmentation are examples of logistical stress. Both can weigh on workers’ mental health.
Remote work may increase one type of stress while substantially reducing another. For women—who spend almost twice as long per day as men providing unpaid care for children, older adults and other family members, according to the 2022 BLS American Time Use Survey—reducing daily chronic stress may have a larger impact on overall well-being than increasing workplace interaction.
We shouldn’t assume eliminating one stressor, like isolation, automatically improves overall mental health—especially if it significantly increases several other sources of anxiety.
Flexibility Reduces Invisible Cognitive Load
Women’s mental health is affected by more than work itself. It’s impacted by everything surrounding work.
This includes logistical stressors, from school and daycare pick-up and drop-off, doctors’ appointments, sick kids and elder care, to things like pregnancy accommodations, pumping and menopause. Not only do women take on a larger share of these responsibilities—and all of the pregnancy- and women’s health-related items—but they also report greater impacts on their emotional well-being as a result of these duties, according to Pew Research.
Working remotely amid all of these responsibilities isn’t just a cute perk. It removes a measurable share of daily cognitive load.
‘Remote Work’ Is Not Just One Thing
For some reason, the conversation around where work happens is all too often framed as a binary: office versus remote.
In reality, there is a continuum of ways to work, including fully in-office, hybrid, mostly remote and fully remote. Among remote-capable jobs, Gallup reports 26% are fully remote, 52% are hybrid and 22% are conducted on-site.
There is no universal “best way to work” for every person. It’s highly personal and circumstantial. But it should be noted that hybrid workers are just as productive as fully in-office workers, according to a 2024 study published in Nature. They also show more job satisfaction and less turnover, particularly for female employees with long commutes.
In short, hybrid work isn’t a compromise between two extremes. It’s often the strongest option for the greatest percentage of workers.
What Should Employers Actually Be Optimizing For?
The remote work versus in-office work debate oversimplifies what we should be measuring. While focusing on collaboration, productivity, loneliness or engagement is important, workers, especially women, don’t experience work one metric at a time. They experience the cumulative impact of dozens of daily stressors.
Organizations should be asking how they can create meaningful connections and belonging, while maintaining workers’ autonomy, flexibility and psychological safety—rather than treating these factors as mutually exclusive.
The bottom line is that flexibility shouldn’t be a perk. For many women, it’s what makes ambitious careers sustainable. In fact, women chose remote work as a top valued benefit at an 11-percentage-point higher rate than men, according to 2025 research by The Hiring Lab, and also prioritized flexible hours and childcare assistance.
This isn’t an argument that everyone should work remotely. It’s an argument against drawing sweeping conclusions from one dimension of well-being.
If we’re serious about improving women’s mental health at work, we need a more nuanced conversation—one that considers the full picture of women’s lives, not just where they happen to clock in.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
