Source: https://drjustinbateh.com/in-the-media/
You're 31% less likely to get promoted.
Your output has nothing to do with it.
Fully remote workers get promoted 31 percent less often.
Hybrid workers keep pace with everyone in the office.
Nine ways proximity bias shows up before anyone calls it that:
1/ Task assignments go to whoever's visible
→ New work lands on people nearby, by habit
→ Not on whoever's actually best suited
→ Visibility substitutes for evaluation
2/ Casual hallway trust becomes career currency
→ Quick chats build familiarity fast
→ Familiarity gets mistaken for competence
→ Remote work simply can't produce as many of them
3/ Managers forget who isn't in the room
→ Nearly half admit forgetting remote workers exist
→ Not maliciously, just by default
→ Out of sight quietly becomes out of the plan
4/ Layoffs cut the people they know least
→ Decisions get easier without a face attached
→ Remote workers are 35 percent more likely to be cut
→ Distance makes the hard call feel less personal
5/ Executives openly reward showing up
→ Favorable assignments go to in-office effort
→ Raises and promotions follow the same pattern
→ Location becomes a hidden line item in the decision
6/ Mentorship happens where the mentor already is
→ Advice flows to whoever's easiest to reach
→ Remote workers get less of it by default
→ Growth compounds unevenly for reasons unrelated to skill
7/ Calibration meetings run on memory, not data
→ The names people can picture get discussed first
→ The ones they can't, get discussed last, if at all
→ Memory favors whoever occupies physical space
8/ Hybrid workers dodge the penalty entirely
→ Same flexibility, none of the promotion gap
→ The problem isn't remote work itself
→ It's being fully absent from the room where it counts
9/ Visibility becomes something you have to engineer
→ Waiting for fairness doesn't close the gap
→ Documenting wins and showing up where decisions happen does
→ The bias doesn't disappear, but it can be out-worked
Proximity bias doesn't ask if your work was good. It just asks if anyone happened to see it.