Who’s working from home in Minnesota?

Following the influx of remote work at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has emerged as a significant benefit that many employees value and plenty of employers continue to offer. This is especially evident in Minnesota, which has the highest rate of remote work in the Midwest, according to a recent analysis by the Minneapolis Fed.

However, not everyone in the state has the opportunity to work from home. The rapid transition to remote work unfolded unevenly across the Minnesota workforce. Many frontline and low-wage workers had to work in person during the worst of the pandemic while others were able to take their work home with them.

The emergence of the remote workforce has revealed some significant differences between those who are working from home and the broader working population: Remote workers in Minnesota tend to be highly educated, midcareer, and more often White. Other differences appear across demographic lines that set these workers apart from the rest of Minnesota’s workforce.

A college-educated, white-collar workforce

As of 2022, nearly 17 percent of Minnesotan workers reported in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey that they usually worked from home.¹ This includes workers who are either fully remote or spend a majority of their work week at home.²

Remote workers tend to concentrate in certain occupations. Over one-third of remote workers in the state work white-collar jobs in management, business, and finance occupations (see Figure 1). These roles are often more conducive for workers to bring their work home with them, while occupations such as service, construction, and transportation mainly require an in-person presence.

The top remote-work occupations can be found within various industries in Minnesota. By industry, the highest shares of remote workers are found in professional services and finance, and perhaps more surprisingly, in health care and social services. While only a small share of remote workers are health care practitioners, the large health care sector in Minnesota includes many management, professional, and administrative jobs within the industry that can be done remotely.

These occupational and industry factors collide frequently—and beneficially—for Minnesota because of the large number of company headquarters in the state, according to Colleen Flaherty Manchester, a professor in the Department of Work and Organizations at the University of Minnesota. As of 2024, Minnesota had 17 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the state, while most other states in the Ninth District had none.

“There is this kind of industry cluster in terms of managerial and professional workers here because of the high number of headquarter companies in Minnesota,” Flaherty Manchester explained. “I think that’s going to contribute to making this area more of a stronghold for keeping remote work.”

Occupations where remote work is more common also tend to require a college degree. As a result, remote workers are often highly educated; about 63 percent of remote employees have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 42 percent of all workers in Minnesota (see Figure 2).

These highly educated workers tend to be midcareer and slightly older than the general working population. Many are millennials and Generation X, with over 50 percent of remote workers falling between 35 and 54 years old compared with 41 percent of all workers falling in this age range.

Meanwhile, less than 15 percent of remote workers are under 30 years old. Younger workers are less likely to have a college degree and are more often in jobs like food service and retail that require an in-person presence. But even among college-educated workers in this younger age group, working from home is less common than among their older counterparts.

Remote work is higher among women and married workers

Remote workers also differ from the overall Minnesotan workforce by gender, marital status, and the presence of children in the home.

Minnesotan women make up about 53 percent of remote workers but 48 percent of the state’s overall workforce (see Figure 3). Nearly 65 percent of remote workers are married, a share that is 10 percentage points higher than that of the total working population. Subsequently, a higher share of remote workers have children in their households compared with all workers in Minnesota (see Figure 4).

“The Twin Cities metro area has a high proportion of dual-career couples,” Flaherty Manchester explained. With both people in career-oriented jobs, and often with children at home, “the flexibility provided by remote work is going to be more important for these households.”

Phyllis Moen, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who has been studying the impact of remote work across demographic groups, said that “parents often want to work from home because they need it to manage all the pieces of their lives.”

However, the demographic differences are not just a result of varying preferences for remote work. These differences are partially due to the high educational attainment among Minnesotan women, which leads them toward occupations where remote work is more feasible. When comparing all college-educated remote workers, the gender shares are nearly even.

Moen noted that “remote work isn’t just a mommy track or a thing for working parents. Research shows that people who do not have kids benefit from remote work just as much as those who were raising children or caring for older adults.”

White workers overrepresented in the remote workforce

The differences in the work-from-home population extend across race and ethnicity as well. Eighty-two percent of remote workers in Minnesota are White, over 3 percentage points higher than the share of all White workers in the workforce (see Figure 5). While Asian American workers have a slightly higher share as well, Black, Hispanic, and Native workers are underrepresented among remote workers.

“These differences are largely because of the types of jobs people are in, which are stratified across education, race, and gender,” said Moen. Black, Hispanic, and Native workers, she added, “are more often in jobs that are usually considered ‘essential,’ meaning they have to be at the workplace and don’t have many opportunities to work from home.”

This holds true in Minnesota, where 20 percent of all White workers are in management, business, and financial occupations while shares of Black, Hispanic, and Native workers in these occupations are all under 14 percent.

“It’s important to acknowledge the inequity of who gets to work remotely and these disparities by race and ethnicity, especially since those who do get to work remotely benefit from it,” Moen said. “People prefer to have control over where and when they work.”

Endnotes

1 Estimates were calculated using 2022 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 1-year estimates from IPUMS USA. The total number of employed respondents includes the universe of respondents to the TRANWORK variable, which were respondents 16 years were or older who worked for pay in the last week at the time the survey. Anyone who responded that they worked from home instead of commuting to work in the last seven days (“80” in the TRANWORK variable) was classified as a remote worker. All estimates were calculated using the person weights variable (PERWT).

2 The measurement of remote work in the American Community Survey will capture fully remote workers, but not all instances of hybrid remote work. Therefore, these remote workers should be considered all those who “usually” work from home.