They've been both blamed for emptying out Hartford's downtown and envied for their ability to do laundry during the workday. But who exactly are these remote workers who have become so visible ‒ yet invisible ‒ in Connecticut since the pandemic?

Data crunchers at CoworkingMag have an answer: The typical Hartford remote worker hails from the Gen X or millennial generations, has a bachelor's degree or higher and earns around $80,000 a year. Women also make up 52.1 percent of the remote workforce in Greater Hartford.

"We can begin to paint a cohesive portrait of Hartford's remote workers in today's modern work landscape," a spokesperson for CoworkingMag said in announcing the findings, culled from the census and economic data.

Using data about a cohort of 627,816 workers in Hartford, East Hartford, West Hartford and surrounding towns, CoworkingMag determined that 16.6 percent of the Greater Hartford area workforce is remote, a bit more than 1 percentage point higher than the national average. Overall, Greater Bridgeport's proportion of remote workers was the highest in the state, at 19.3 percent, while Greater New Haven lagged, at 13.2 percent.

Other tidbits about Hartford's remote workers: They are most likely employed in the "financial activities" sector, followed by professional and business services and education and health.

New Haven's remote workers were most likely to work in education and health.

Bridgeport remote workers reported the highest median income, at $102,000, compared to 80,000 in both New Haven and Hartford. Professional and business services firms employ the most Bridgeport-area remote workers.

Connecticut's remote workforce as a whole also contains a surprising number of manufacturing employees: 11.1 percent of the total in Hartford, 11.2 percent in New Haven and 7.8 percent in greater Bridgeport.

A survey last year found that full-time remote workers were present in 17.4 percent of all Connecticut households, putting the state in the top 10 nationally for states in the prevalence of remote work.

Bloomfield was singled out last year as the best city in the U.S. for remote workers based on the number of job openings in town that list remote work as an option as of March 2023.

Insurers including Cigna and UnitedHealth were singled out by the study's author as employing a large number of remote workers as of early 2023. But many major corporations in Hartford have since issued calls to return to the office, slightly easing office vacancy rates in the region as of early this year.