No Room of her Own: Married Couples’ Negotiation of Workspace at Home During COVID-19

Abstract

The current study examined the right to a professional workspace and separation between private and public within the home as an arena of gendered negotiation and struggle between spouses working from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Using a qualitative, inductive approach based on grounded theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with fifteen professional couples in Israel about their experiences with working from home and the division of labor and space between spouses. Our analysis revealed three key issues related to these experiences: the division of physical workspace between the spouses, the division of work time (compared to home time), and bodily-spatial aspects of the infiltration of workspace into home through the Zoom camera. The patterns described here suggest that the gendered power relations between spouses working from home are reproduced through an unequal negotiation of space and time in the home, so that in practice, men’s work was prioritized in spatio-temporal terms, whereas women’s workspace and time was more fragmented and dispersed throughout the home and day. These findings illuminate women’s right to workspace in the home as an issue of gender equality that has been amplified by the current global pandemic, and how gendered divisions of space and time serve to reproduce the gender order.

The work-family interface and the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review

“…Women noted that their partners were more involved in unpaid work; nevertheless, they adopted the “assistant” role or had a poor performance ( Chung et al, 2020 ; Çoban, 2021 ). Men’s paid and women’s unpaid work were prioritised ( Soubelet-Fagoaga et al, 2021 ; Waismel-Manor et al, 2021 ). No significant differences were found between the number of hours dedicated to paid workload between men and women ( Stefanova et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Further, these antagonistic findings could also be related to the idea that, especially in families where the unpaid workload was gendered before the COVID-19 outbreak, mothers took the bulk of childcare ( Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ). Hence, for these mothers, the boundary absence combined with increased unpaid workload boosted role strain during the lockdown ( Andrade and Petiz Lousã, 2021 ; Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ), making it challenging to apply segmentation strategies ( Waismel-Manor et al, 2021 ), especially from family-to-work ( Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Additionally, some mothers felt that children ( Aplin-Houtz et al, 2021 ) or the whole family ( Çoban, 2021 ) did not comply with the physical boundaries. However, their husbands’ physical boundaries were not crossed, not even by children ( Waismel-Manor et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The tension in the parental subsystem did spill into the couple’s subsystem ( Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ). Regarding the case of dual-earners, women also reported increased difficulties in segmenting work and family ( Çoban, 2021 ; Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ; Waismel-Manor et al, 2021 ). It looks like gender traditional roles pushed women to be the “nomad” and men to have a designated room to work from home ( Çoban, 2021 ; Leroy et al, 2021 ; Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta et al, 2021 ; Waismel-Manor et al, 2021 ).…”

‘You Can’t Eat Soap’: Reimagining COVID-19, Work, Family and Employment from the Global South

“…From the North we know that the pandemic may aggravate gender inequalities in nuclear families; for instance, only 25% of women teleworking in France have a dedicated space to work in their home, compared with 41% of men (Lambert et al, 2020). Likewise, in Israeli couples, women’s work was more dispersed in different places of the home and fragmented in time throughout the day than men’s work was (Waismel-Manor et al, 2021). However, the pandemic may affect gender dynamics differently in the South, where family structures are more diverse.…”