Flexible working emerged in the late 1970s. Its early champions aimed to help mothers of young children enter the workforce, and to improve work–life balance. They expected it to reshape traditional work patterns and thus to foster greater gender equality at home and at work.
This gendered framing, initially centred on mothers, resulted in flexible work becoming (and, arguably, remaining today) strongly associated with women and childcare. This limited its broader potential and, paradoxically, has reinforced gender inequalities. Other carers, and particularly fathers, have faced barriers in accessing flexibility. Employment legislation over the decades has consistently provided greater rights to mothers.
In the workplace this played out in the development of formal (contractual) versus informal or ad hoc flexibility. Still today, men often rely more on informal arrangements to avoid career penalties, while women are more likely to use formal part-time or reduced hours, which have been shown to harm long-term earnings and pensions.
For all workers, the increasing availability of flexible working has brought both benefits and drawbacks. Flexibility can enhance quality of life when it gives workers real autonomy. However, it often results in blurred work–life boundaries, increased workloads, and persistent inequalities. Many lower-paid workers lack meaningful access to flexible working, while women bear disproportionate career costs.
From the employer perspective, organisations promote flexible working for business reasons. From the earliest days it was known to support both recruitment and retention; more recently, its positive impact on diversity and productivity has been understood. But uptake often lags due to workplace culture, line manager attitudes, and lack of consistent evidence for direct or bottom line financial benefits. The roll-back of hybrid working, at least in many larger and global organisations, illustrates how challenging it is to adopt flex as more than a conditional accommodation; though the robust health of hybrid among most employers (other than some of the largest, global organisations) may suggest the beginnings of a deeper shift.
Overall, since the 1970s flexible working has supported more women into paid employment but has fallen short of the vision to equalise caring responsibilities or reduce working hours. Many flexible workers report little or no quality-of-life improvement.
Flexible working has only partially delivered on its early promise. To genuinely improve quality of life, it requires deeper cultural, structural, and policy changes that ensure equitable access, tackle workload and work intensification, and address gendered disadvantages.