Since many of us worked from home during the epidemic, it became clear that the impact was not particularly equal, certainly among binary-income couples. The risks of telecommuting for women during the epidemic are justifiably high, and many have gone beyond their domestic responsibilities and the challenges of the transition to a remote work style.
Research from the University of Nevada shows that various tools provided by employers to promote telecommuting did little, and in many cases made stress and internal risks worse.
The experimenters interviewed several hundred workers who had once worked ten weeks during the first wave of the epidemic. The analysis showed that stressful situations increased significantly among women in families with children, and the authors suggested that this was probably due to a significant blurring of their work-life balance.
This is further supported by a recent study from Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, which shows that when both partners work at home, men tend to do better than women.
Research shows that men tend to do far fewer household chores when their wives also work at home than when they work at home and women work in the office. It didn’t matter to women where their husbands worked.
In addition, when women returned to the office, they felt less guilty about not spending time with their families and not doing their homework. “We did it so that men and women don’t have the same experience of working at home,” explained the researchers.
However, there are some gender differences in their work and family responsibilities. There are also significant differences in how productive men and women can be when working at home.
UConn’s research shows that women experience more interruptions when working at home than men. The gender divide was particularly surprising for us. We heard anecdotally that it went away, but now we have received empirical evidence that women are constantly imposed by work-related and special responsibilities, say the researchers.
Women have paid a new price since the epidemic, and they continue. It’s more than just anxiety. Downtimes are associated with employee performance and heightened emotional exhaustion. The experimenters interviewed several hundred workers from various professions, all of whom worked from home in the United States.
Each party was a knowledge worker with children or other dependents and a spouse or common-law partner at home. Respondents reported an increase in disruptions since the outbreak, but the nature of those disruptions has changed significantly.
We concluded that interruption load did not contribute inversely, as women reported all kinds of non-work interruptions, suggesting that women see more time interrupted than men,” explain the researchers.
These findings indicate that husbands can significantly help their wives with housework by performing additional tasks, especially when their wives have busy work schedules.
However, as the boundaries between private and professional life blur, binary-income couples experience less conflict. Although the scenario where both couples worked at home suggests that work is done, it significantly increases the feeling of role conflict associated with the disengagement of the brain from work and a feeling of guilt towards the employer.
