Literature Review
April 27, 2022
Introduction
The impact of the crisis has never been gender neutral, and COVID-19 is no exception. The widespread blockade brought about by the popularity of COVID-19 has been accompanied by the global spread of teleworking and distance learning. This unique life dynamic has had a very significant impact on families. In this environment, workers, especially female workers, are less efficient as well as less productive. During the pandemic, numerous studies have been conducted to examine and explain this phenomenon, which will reveal how gender inequality affects the relationship between women's paid and unpaid work in the home working environment, and consequently the productivity of female workers.
Telework and distance learning become the new norm (Aldossari &Chaudhry, 2020). This unprecedented environment has had a considerable impact on the family, with most of the family's daily life, office work and childcare and education now being in the same space. In this environment,Nishimura(2022) thought that working from home inevitably exacerbates the negative spillover effects between work and family, bringing work-related stress into family life and, conversely, conflicts in family life can affect productivity. This is because the boundaries between these two areas are blurred. Similarly, it was found that as home working time increased, the boundaries between the two domains of work and family blurred and women tended to be more responsive to family demands(Lyttelton et al., 2022), with the consequent differential impact on the efficiency and quality of home working.
The gender gap in absolute freedom to undertake household tasks, which existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, has become more pronounced and conflict-prone during the pandemic. The extra time spent working at home was mainly on housework and childcare (Offer & Schneider, 2011). If mothers who work at home are also tasked with managing children or other household needs, their telecommuting time and productivity may be more vulnerable than fathers, as mothers' work attention is not as focused as fathers' and is more interrupted by household and child care (Craig & Mullan, 2013; Mattingly & Blanchi, 2003). Women are greatly affected by these conflicts (Alon, Doepke, Olmstead-Rumsey, & Tertilt, 2020), especially working mothers,Clark (2021)suggested that their participation in the paid economy has decreased while unpaid childcare has increased during this time. Furthermore, with the closure of schools and childcare centres, families were unable to access institutional and community childcare services, placing an increased duty of care on families, with women taking on more caring responsibilities than men (Darmody, Smyth, & Russell, 2020). And research suggests that in some developed countries, often men are less likely to reduce their office hours to take on domestic labour obligations, undoubtedly increasing the burden on women, and this gender gap may extend to telecommuting efficiency, with potential implications for women's career development and pay.
However, during the pandemic, studies have also offered different perspectives on the distribution of domestic work when working from home, with some studies reporting that an increase in the proportion of domestic work undertaken by men reduces the gender gap (Shafer et al., 2020; Carlson et al., 2021), while others suggest that the proportion of childcare undertaken by women did not change significantly between the pre- and post-pandemic periods (Sevilla et al., 2020). after the pandemic did not change significantly (Sevilla and Smith, 2020). A Canadian study showed that home-based fathers took on a greater share of housework and childcare than mothers (Shafer et al., 2020). A study in Japan also showed that the gender gap in housework and childcare narrowed when men worked at home (Nishimura et al., 2021)
Discussion
Inequalities in domestic and paid work are exacerbated by unequal distribution at home and at work in telecommuting environments (Lyttelton et al., 2022). Women are not rewarded for their unpaid work, i.e. household chores, childcare, etc., and are not valued by society, and their work is not positively influenced and their productivity is at risk. Shafer et al. (2020) argue that factors associated with a more equal sharing of housework include time availability factors, such as working from home, and factors related to the relative income and educational resources of spouses.
Conclusion
The impact that working from home has on women will undoubtedly indirectly affect the efficiency of women's telecommuting. Under the pandemic, the share of home-work obligations tends to be greater for women, which also means that this unequal distribution of non-academic responsibilities places a significant constraint on women's work (Pereira, 2021). Society needs to make changes to give women inclusivity in paid work and value in unpaid work, while men need to take on more responsibility for domestic work.