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 than men on the identical schedule. Across Greater Cincinnati and Southwest Ohio, the 2025 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn offers a result that deserves a closer look, especially the wording "identical schedule."
The conventional explanation for remote work and promotion centers on visibility. Stay home and you get overlooked. If remote work were the whole story, anyone at a distance from the office, whether in Mason, Blue Ash, or Florence, would fall behind at an equal pace. The data points elsewhere. Men on the same three-day arrangement fare better than women on it, so the penalty doesn't attach to remote work itself. It attaches to a woman working remotely. The people deciding on promotions read the same calendar and draw two different conclusions.
Where the statistic comes from
Women in the Workplace is an annual study of US corporate employers that McKinsey and LeanIn have run since 2015, combining company data with employee surveys. The 2025 edition compared promotion outcomes by work arrangement and gender and found the gap among people working remotely three or more days. The same report found that 19% of employers had scaled back flexible arrangements such as remote or hybrid options. The research is observational, so it can't explain precisely why a woman working from home is judged differently from a man doing the same, and it can't rule out that women and men pick remote arrangements for different reasons. What it does show is that the schedule alone doesn't account for the gap, which makes "just come in more" an incomplete answer.
How this plays out day to day in Cincinnati and its surrounding communities
Imagine a talent review in a Cincinnati office tower, or in a Blue Ash or Sharonville campus conference room. Two directors are being considered, both working from home three days a week. When his name arrives, someone remarks, "He's deep in the platform work, which is why we don't see him much." When hers arrives, someone says, "She's been less visible this year." The calendars match. His absence reads as focus; hers reads as drift. Everyone gathered here, from Covington to Blue Ash, means well. They fill the gap with the narrative they already held, and the narrative they held about her was about caregiving, whether or not she has any responsibilities of that kind.
Why this matters for you in Southwest Ohio
If you work remotely and feel uneasy about it, that unease is reasonable, and the fix isn't simply to commute in more often. Showing up at the office doesn't alter the story a room tells about your absence. Progress comes when a person has a results-based account ready to share, so colleagues aren't left to speculate about what someone has accomplished. The visibility that counts isn't your face in a hallway in Downtown Cincinnati. It's your work in the sentence someone speaks when your name comes up.
Action to take from here
Let your contributions be seen, but keep the focus on the work itself rather than on staging it. Send your manager a brief note every two weeks, three lines covering what shipped and what comes next, so the person advocating for you has a ready sentence. Then ask one direct question: "If I were in the office five days a week, what would you see that you aren't seeing now?" The candid answers are useful, and the vague ones tell you the judgment was never about the calendar.
Think back to your most recent performance review in Fairfield or Erlanger: who spoke on your behalf, and what information did they actually have?