Coming out of the pandemic is an opportunity to build more equitable workplaces—but only if employers act now. Otherwise, burnout is likely going to either drive women out of the paid workforce entirely or cause them to dial back their careers, potentially setting back gender equality by a whole generation, says Correll, professor of sociology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.

Since the very beginning of the pandemic, Correll and her team have been running focus groups with employees from across the country to learn how remote work is transforming their workplace culture and norms. While employees note many benefits of remote work and report a desire to keep working remotely in the future, the expectations that employees be “always on” for work and for family has also led to an increase in feelings of burnout—so much so that many, especially women, are leaving or considering leaving their jobs, Correll says.

As workplaces roll out new hybrid work policies, there is an opportunity to reduce stress and burnout, thereby increasing gender equity and inclusion, but we must be intentional in how we design these policies or we risk importing old biases and barriers into our new hybrid work arrangements, Correll stresses.

Here, Correll shares some of the insights she’s gleaned from her discussions with organizations from across the country and some of her concerns that, if not done right, hybrid work could potentially roll back diversity and inclusion:

What have you been surprised by in your focus groups about how the pandemic is transforming the way we work?
First, the pandemic has fundamentally and permanently transformed how we work. It has given us a unique chance—one that I never thought I would see in my lifetime—to really make things better. We can create new norms, new cultures, and new ways of working. Gender scholars have long argued that giving employees more control over when and where they work would increase gender equity at work. That opportunity is here at this moment. But if we’re not intentional about how we roll out hybrid work, we will likely just create a new version of the same old problem, where we allow employees to work remotely, but continue to implicitly value the “ideal worker” who puts in long hours in the office. My hope is that we seize this moment and create organizations that are truly more diverse and more equitable.

Read the full article about burnout in the workplace for women by Melissa De Witte at Futurity.