Even while the current
health crisis is placing an extreme emphasis on isolation, a recent research
venture by retailmenot.com has given numbers to
a statistic that many may have already suspected or may even be a living part
of. Louisiana has a considerably smaller number of parents who work from home
than most of the nation. Analyzing the Louisiana-centric portion of the study reveals
that only a paltry 29.7 percent of our state's parents have remote-friendly
jobs.
These results are not
unexpected, considering how much of our statewide economy is incumbent upon
hands-on work, but nonetheless, it is a worrying statistic, considering the
again-rising COVID-19 infection rate. Interestingly enough, there is a large
disparity between Louisiana's fathers and mothers in regards to the percentages
of remote-friendly jobs and who must still attend work on-site—a whopping 8
percent higher than the disparity of the nation as a whole. Only 20.5 percent
of Louisiana's fathers are in remote-friendly jobs, while a considerably larger
38.5 percent of mothers are able to reasonably work from home.
Working from home has a wide swath of benefits
and detriments, as everyone in the workforce has experienced by now. If you
have children, earning your wages from home gives you the ability to attend to
your kids, should they need immediate attention for an important reason, but it
also gives way to frequent distractions or an inability to consistently focus.
This is troubling especially for Louisiana, though, because we have such a high
number of single-mother households that have to deal with the struggle of
winning bread and the simultaneous demands of raising a child.
The data from which retailmenot.com has extracted these
results came from both the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Chicago.
You can view the full report by clicking HERE.
