![]() The benefits of enhanced control and autonomy include higher job satisfaction, greater productivity, organizational agility, and improved work morale. This contributes to the increased flexibility of the employees and allows them to exercise greater control on schedule, location, and the process of work. First is the perceived control and autonomy framework which emphasizes the choices that work-from-home offers to employees in terms of deciding how, when, and where to work. There are three conceptual frameworks to assess outcomes of work-from-home arrangements for employees. For this, the paper does a comparative analysis of gender differences in working from home for men and women and specifically focuses on the role of the pandemic in determining such gender differences.Ĭonceptual Frameworks for Determining Outcomes of Work-From-Home In this context, the paper attempts to understand the differences in how men and women in India are navigating work-from-home during the pandemic through a gender lens, and provide gender-disaggregated evidence for the same. When unpaid work interacts with paid work performed from home, it will have implications on their performance at work and also affect their overall well-being. Thus, it is likely that the shifting of workspace to home will result in different experiences for men and women. These new intricacies of the pandemic have increased women’s burden of unpaid work even more as compared to the pre-pandemic times. Simultaneously, the lockdown has also reduced reliance on domestic workers for performing household work. The pandemic has created new types of unpaid work including homeschooling, catering to the needs of all family members who now stay indoors, and maintaining sanitization and hygiene which has added to the existing unpaid domestic work. The emerging gender literature on COVID-19 highlights that the pandemic has exacerbated gender inequalities, where women are sharing a greater burden of unpaid work as compared to men. While such a transition is expected to have a multitude of implications on employees and how they navigate workspaces, it is not a gender-neutral phenomenon. Among other things, the pandemic has relocated all non-essential jobs to the home setting, with most people now doing what is popularly known as “work-from-home”. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the world in unimaginable ways and caused disruptive changes in the lives of people. Finally, the paper identifies how gender intersects with the existing conceptual frameworks of working from home, and makes a strong case for integrating gender considerations in the work-from-home policies. Further, gender roles have also affected women’s decisions regarding returning to work post-pandemic, where some women may not be returning to work at all. Gender roles and unpaid work determine women’s choices regarding when and where to work, boundary management between work and non-work domains, and their experiences of social isolation. When this interacts with work, gender inequalities are reinforced both at work and home. Women are negotiating gendered time–space arrangements within their households with the allocation of limited resources being in favor of men. The findings suggest that the pandemic has disproportionately increased the burden of unpaid work for women as compared to men. Accordingly, I conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 30 dual-earning married couples in India to study the gendered work-from-home experiences of men and women during the pandemic. As the COVID-19 pandemic has relocated all non-essential work to the home setting, it becomes imperative to examine the phenomenon through a gender lens.
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