As digital technologies and homeworking become more embedded in contemporary work, employees face growing pressure to remain constantly visible and responsive. Yet who benefits or bears the costs of these expectations are far from equal. Using a vignette experimental survey of 1,039 UK managers, we examine how managers interpret workers’ digital presenteeism behaviours and whether these patterns vary by gender, parental status, ethnicity, and homeworking status. The findings show that while digital presenteeism consistently enhances managerial evaluations of workers, enhancing their career perspectives, its returns are stratified. It is workers whose commitment is most readily doubted, mothers and Black women, for whom digital signals operate as the most powerful correctives to prevailing managerial stereotypes, producing evaluative returns that exceed those of workers who already approximate the ideal worker image. Yet, although remote working bias is substantially reduced when workers engage in digital presenteeism, those who are already in precarious evaluative positions are penalised most when they set clearer digital boundaries whilst remote working. These patterns suggest that always-on digital behaviours are less a matter of individual preference or habit than a response to unequal managerial expectations, with the burden falling hardest on those least able to bear them.
Authors Heejung Chung, Seohyun Jung