Post-pandemic smart working? For women, university graduates and 35-44 year olds

They are mainly university graduates, workers between the ages of 35 and 44, and employed in the information and communication and financial and insurance sectors. This is the identikit of the 'agile' employee traced by ISTAT in its recent report on Bes, published in mid-April. If in 2021, as a consequence of the COVID-19 epidemic, the use of work from home had reached its peak (14.8%). Since 2022, there has been a gradual decline in this phenomenon. Between 2021 and 2022, the reduction was 2.6 percentage points, and in 2023, the share of employed persons who did agile work in the four weeks prior to the interview fell from 12.2 per cent to 12.0 per cent (i.e. just over 2.8 million individuals). Meanwhile, since April, the emergency legislation has disappeared, and all regulation of agile work is now referred to ordinary laws and company (and individual) agreements.

In the average 2023, Istat recalls, the share of women working from home continues to be higher than that of men (13.4% compared to 11.0%), however the gap narrows: the percentage for men remains unchanged, while for women it drops by 0.4 percentage points. The highest share of employed persons working from home (13.3%) is observed among persons aged between 35 and 44. In the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, the highest percentages were observed among the employed over 60 years of age, for whom the most significant decline (over 4.5 percentage points) was, however, observed in 2022.

The reduction affects high school graduates (-0.8 percentage points compared to 2022) and university graduates (-0.6); but the latter remain the most affected by this measure (27.4% compared to 9.4% of high school graduates and just over 2% of those with at most a middle school diploma, who are essentially stable). ISTAT recalls that for graduates, the increase between 2019 and 2020 was +20.5 points, much stronger than that observed among those employed with a diploma or with at most a secondary school leaving certificate (respectively, +8.2 and +0.7) due to the greater possibility for the most qualified professions to work remotely. Those employed in skilled and white-collar occupations are those who most often work from home (26.4% and 14.6% respectively), for the former the change is smaller (-0.3 percentage points), while for white-collar occupations the decrease is 2.2 percentage points.

Furthermore, as far as sectors of economic activity are concerned, agile work remains most widespread in the Information and Communication sector (57.6%), although it is declining. Then there are Financial and insurance activities (37.3%). For Public Administration and Education, the decrease between 2021 and 2022 had been -9.7 and -11.6 percentage points, respectively; in 2023, the two sectors show small changes but in the opposite direction: for the former a decrease is observed (-0.7, the value becomes 13.4%), for the latter an increase (+0.5, 21.5%).