‘When women go to lower visibility roles because they're more flexible, they can find themselves off the radar when promotion cycles happen'
A major new economic study shows that women experience annual wage increases roughly 11 percentage points smaller than men's, even though their job-to-job transition rates are nearly identical.
Published in February 2026 by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the paper redefines the traditional idea of the “career ladder” to be a more multi-dimensional model based on job value rather than purely income level.
That model reveals that women are climbing a different ladder altogether then the one men are climbing – one focused on amenities like flexibility, remote work and better hours rather than pay – while men cluster around more vertical, pay-based roles.
As hybrid work becomes more ubiquitous, the research states, employers risk hardening a two-tier workforce where flexible roles offer better conditions but slower progression.
Professional women want off of the amenities ladder
The research resonates with an important shift: a growing refusal by women to accept the traditional flexibility-for-pay trade-off, says Rachel Wong, co-founder of networking platform Monday Girl.
“The key theme is that the women in our community are no longer willing to trade pay for flexibility,” Wong says. “That bargain has been normalized for too long, but they're done with it.”
The NBER study found that differences in preferences for non-wage amenities, such as flexibility or benefits, account for nearly 40 per cent of the gender pay gap, with returns from non-employment and uneven bargaining power explaining most of the remainder.
“Because women place greater value on amenities, they are more willing to accept offers from lower-productivity firms that provide better nonwage amenities… This not only leads to lower wage growth for women upon job switching, but also constrains wage growth within jobs, as lower-productivity firms have less room to raise wages in response to outside offers.”
Getting intentional about flexibility
According to the researchers, these results present a fundamentally different way of understanding the gender pay gap: rather than attributing it primarily to discrimination, which seems by many to be an almost unsurmountable barrier, the model shows how structural constraints force women to “sort” themselves into lower value roles as they make necessary choices about home and care priorities.
Duygu Biricik Gulseren, associate professor in the School of Human Resources Management at York University, agrees that the amenities ladder often emerges unintentionally as organizations act on preconceived notions about remote or hybrid work being inherently of lesser value.
It’s not stated explicitly, she stresses, which is part of the problem – the cumulative effect of seemingly harmless decisions about which roles can be remote, how performance is evaluated and who gets assigned high-visibility stretch projects can create exactly the outcome DEI programs are trying to avoid.
“To address this, organizations need to be very deliberate about how flexibility is implemented. If flexibility is unintentionally treated as a signal of lower value, then the solution is to anchor decisions back to job value,” Biricik Gulseren says.
“That means evaluating performance based on outputs rather than visibility, ensuring that flexible roles are fully included in promotion and leadership pipelines, and regularly tracking whether pay and advancement differ by gender and work arrangement.”
Her research focuses on pay equity and job evaluation, and she says the NBER findings align with patterns she observes in Canadian workplaces: the gap is not primarily about effort or persistence – it is about the structure of the opportunities women encounter and the trade-offs they are asked to make.
The amenities ladder persists
Wong says mid- to senior-level women now want competitive compensation and the autonomy to do their best work, and culture has become a real filter.
However, she adds that the trade-off still affects career progression, even for women who are actively resisting it: “They have done the grinding years of putting in the work, getting to that position, putting in their hours, but they're choosing with that the workplaces that align with where they want to go, and not just what pays most in year one."
The structural realities of how flexible work is designed and where it is available create unavoidable patterns that individual workers can’t fully overcome through choice or negotiation alone.
"When women go to lower visibility roles because they're more flexible, they can find themselves off the radar when promotion cycles happen," Wong says.
"Without more inclusive and effective networking spaces, women are still struggling to build the relationships necessary for career progression and ultimately limiting their professional growth and potential and representation in leadership.”
The importance of job design
Biricik Gulseren says not all jobs are equally compatible with flexibility, and job design becomes critical. Employers need to distinguish between roles that genuinely require physical presence or synchronous collaboration and roles where flexibility has been restricted for cultural or habitual reasons rather than operational ones.
This distinction matters, she stresses, because if high-value, high-progression roles are systematically classified as incompatible with flexibility without rigorous justification, the result is a gendered sorting pattern that pay equity audits may miss.
"Organizations need to ask whether the tasks and KSAOs required for a role actually allow for flexible or remote work,” Biricik Gulseren explains.
“Importantly, this is not about the level of skill, but the type of skill and the nature of the work. A role can be highly or less skilled and still require physical presence. Flexibility is about whether the work can be performed independent of time and location constraints.”
Practical steps: decoupling flexibility from visibility
Wong recommends a simple diagnostic exercise for employers: map the organization's roles by pay level, seniority and flexibility eligibility, then look for patterns. If the highest-paid, most senior roles are overwhelmingly in-office while flexible roles cluster at lower levels, that is evidence of structural sorting that will compound over time.
"The first thing is being very clear on how flexibility needs to be decoupled from visibility,” Wong say.
“If someone is remote or on a compressed schedule coming back from, say, parental leave, that should have zero bearing on whether or not they're being considered for high-impact projects or leadership opportunities.”
She says the default right now is out of sight, out of mind, and that disproportionately penalizes women.
Managers, even well-intentioned ones, tend to assign opportunities to the people they see most often and interact with most naturally. In hybrid environments, that creates an unconscious bias toward in-office workers.
"There needs to be very explicit criteria for what advancement looks like,” Wong says.
“And that needs to be presented and shared with all of the team members there, that it doesn't hinge on physical presence. And I do think very explicit criteria does help that.”
Biricik Gulseren stresses that clarity at the managerial level is also crucial, pointing out that managers are the ones making day-to-day decisions about assignments, feedback, development opportunities and informal sponsorship.
Without clear guidance, she says, managers will default to the patterns that feel most natural—which often means favoring the workers they see most and know best.
"Without clear expectations, managers may rely on proximity and informal visibility as shortcuts for commitment,” Biricik Gulseren says.
“Organizations need to actively counter this by setting standards for equitable evaluation and holding leaders accountable for career outcomes across different ways of working."
