A culture of working from home means that women risk “losing out” against men, Theresa May has warned.

The former prime minister welcomed the right to request flexible working but cautioned that “out of sight can be out of mind” if women do not have regular, in-person interactions with their employers.

She made the remarks in conversation with Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister, during a Global Institute for Women’s Leadership event held at King’s College London.

Mrs May co-founded the conservative feminist pressure group Women2Win in 2005, and said this work had shown her that middle managers found flexible working “difficult to comprehend” before the pandemic.

“Now everybody has found, unless they’re doing very practical, physical jobs, they’re able to work at home,” Mrs May said. “There’s a positive to this, it can be done, so hopefully more managers will recognise [that] now.

“And I think we’ll see flexibility being offered for all in a way that it wasn’t previously.

“But there’s a potential negative here for women, I think which we have to beware, which is that if more women use that than the men, and so more of the women are not physically present in offices, being seen by senior management, able to have the conversations around the coffee machine, there is a potential that they will lose out.

“I think there’s a danger if we see a lot of women rightfully doing the flexible working and seeing that as a way to better manage their responsibilities, but perhaps forgetting that out of sight can be out of mind.”

According to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which date from April 2020, women were slightly more likely to work from home (47.5 per cent) than their male colleagues (45.7 per cent).

An ONS report published the following year said “Women were more likely than men to report that homeworking gave them more time to complete work and fewer distractions, while men were more likely to report better wellbeing.

“For men, homeworking aided the creation of new ideas, while for women this was more likely to be seen as a barrier.”

Last November, a survey for The Telegraph found that only one in 10 women working from home plan to return to the office, despite warnings from Catherine Mann, a Bank of England policymaker.

‘A lot of eyes were on China’

On her own experiences as only the second female prime minister of Britain, serving between 2016 and 2019 after years in Cabinet positions, Mrs May expressed her frustration with her “Maybot” nickname and claimed interviewers “always wanted me to say that I’d cried at various points”.

“What I found frustrating about it is, from my point of view, I was always just trying to be as accurate as possible and be as clear as possible,” she said. “Not [to] sort of try to fudge issues but be careful so you didn’t give people the wrong impression one way or the other.

“And that, to me, was about being more professional actually but somehow a lot of people didn’t want ‘the professional’, they wanted something else there. And I suppose if you didn’t give that what I suppose they would say is the human side of it, then the robotic, ‘the Maybot’, that sort of description was used.”

Mrs May – who was in Downing Street at the time of the Salisbury poisonings – added that Britons were “perhaps less surprised” at Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine in light of Russia’s previous actions.

“What we’re dealing with here is not just defending Ukraine, but defending the very essence of democracy itself,” she said. “I don’t think anybody can be surprised at any of it.”

Describing Putin as an “opportunist” who built up troops on the Ukrainian border while “a lot of eyes were on China”, Mrs May said he had underestimated the response of both Ukraine and the West.