If you started working from home in the last 16 months, you’re in good company. Over 100 million Americans transitioned from in-person to remote work during the…
FiveThirtyEight examined the results of a survey of over 10,000 global knowledge workers2 recruited by Future Forum, a research consortium run by Slack.3 The survey included over 5,000 respondents from the U.S., plus approximately 1,000 additional respondents each from Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.
We wanted to see which groups, if any, want to return to full-time in-person work. Participants were asked a variety of questions, including how working remotely compares with office work, how satisfied they were with their workplace and where their sense of belonging stood at this point in the pandemic. We then looked at the workplace experiences of groups that experts have already identified as having been most affected by the switch from in-person to remote work: those who experience workplace inequality due to their race, gender, or both; and those who provide the majority of their family’s childcare or eldercare.
The group most enthusiastic to return to in-person work is white men — 30 percent want the office to be the only place where they work. Roughly half as many Black men — almost 16 percent — feel the same. White and Black women are in the middle, around 22 percent each.
That might be because in the U.S., office culture was originally created to accommodate the needs of white people, and specifically men, says Angelica Leigh, a professor of management and organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Leigh’s research shows that when dealing with the aftermath of massive social events that disproportionately affect people of color, such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, many employees of color supress their emotions in order to fit into the norms of the office. She and her colleague refer to that suppression as identity labor.












