Will Working From Home Work For You?
For the five years preceding the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 I was working in universities that were a long way from my home. As a commuter, I just had time to draw breath at weekends, and sort my laundry out, before I was back in the office.
Imagine the blessing I experienced when we were all required to work from home. That enormous commute was draining and life really was all work. Stepping into my dining room for meetings was an absolute joy – but then I didn’t have to home school or share my computer with my children and all the rest that went with many people’s family lives.
Realising the benefits of working from home appears to be a fairly common response. University staff surveys are indicating overwhelming support for being home based for a substantial part of the week. For many like me, it limits the commute, with associated lower costs for travel. It is better for the environment if there are less of us on the roads and it allows us to more easily slot in some of those domestic chores.
Online working has also meant that we have become used to seeing children popping up in meetings and cats swishing their tales in colleagues’ faces, as well as regularly hearing the doorbell ring because of a delivery.
Indeed, working from home in these ways has created a level of humanisation that was unseen before. It is a real cause for hope as it has collapsed the fiction that we have no care or other responsibilities than those that come with our professional roles. Perhaps, we whisper to ourselves, having these other commitments will no longer be seen as detrimental to the needs of optimal working?
Yet before we open the champagne, we have also learnt of the huge differential impacts that come with working from home. For example, whilst men’s research productivity has risen, that of women has fallen. The ‘leaky pipeline’ – the process that leaves many early career women researchers stuck in precarious employment or exiting university work - has become a whole lot leakier. Stress, anxiety and depression have increased.
A major reason is because the finely tuned juggling of family care and paid work that enables many women to survive has crumbled. This is not only because of home working. It is also because of constantly changing policy and practice arising from COVID-19. Home schooling, anxiety about older relatives who may be in care or needing to isolate, plus the switch to online teaching, the loss of access to research facilities, increased need for student support, dealing with changing regulatory environments and concerns about our own health have all taken their toll.
Danielle Couch, Belinda O’Sullivan and Christina Malatzky draw on their personal stories to analyse the different dimensions of working from home. They openly talk about how their work and family lives collided in ways that left them feeling inadequate and fearful. They experienced pressures from long-standing practices of the separation of home and work. One of these was that they felt judged as not being ‘fully present’ when their attention was distracted by their children’s needs. Yet they also felt they were not giving enough time and care to their children as work impeded. In a nutshell, they were left feeling failures in both their professional and maternal roles.
These three academic women hope that the changes brought about by the pandemic experience will create more enlightened and liberal workplaces. However, they are also apprehensive that the pre-pandemic structures will soon reassert themselves leaving women worse off than before.
Herminia Ibarra, Julia Gillard and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reinforce these concerns by outlining why working from home isn’t necessarily good for women. They outline three potential trip wires:
· Flexible working can increase work-family conflict. Whilst men prioritize and expand their work sphere, women find themselves taking on more domestic responsibility.
· There are huge question marks over how working from home might exacerbate existing inequalities in women’s career opportunities. For example, those informal moments of career coaching after a meeting as you walk back to the office disappear. This can particularly affect women in middle rank roles as it is at this stage when women can find themselves stuck.
· Working from home can create a new form of presenteeism. Whilst everyone is meeting online there is a level playing field. What happens, however, when half the staff are in the office and the others are not? This is a proverbial out-of-sight-out-of-mind situation that creates a whole new divide between those who are seen to be serious about their work (those present) and those who are less committed by choosing to work flexibly.
How do we, then, preserve the positive benefits of the last eighteen months and still protect our career opportunities?
If there is one place we can start, it is to raise the profile of how many people in the workplace have caring responsibilities. You might be surprised at how high this is - a US survey suggests that 75% of the workforce are family caregivers. That’s an awful lot of people juggling long hours cultures.
You can do this by doing a simple census in your department, school or faculty. That data can then be used to raise the profile of how much care-giving is happening – for family, for friends, for students, for colleagues.
One way of profile raising is to feed this into discussions - whether that is through equality and diversity committees or through charter marks such as Advance HE’s Athena Swan programme. The ambition - to take liberties with a quote from the sociologist C Wright Mills - is that care-giving can move from being a private trouble to a far more institutional equity issue.
Let me know how you get on!
with the warmest of wishes,
christina
If you are interested in further reading
You may well have noticed there is an awful lot of discussion at the moment about the impact COVID-19 is having on women’s employment and women’s careers. Really good sources can be:
Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Kings College London – for good stuff on women’s equality generally! See also Essays on Equality: COVID-19, the road to a gender equal recovery
McKinsey reports, for example, Seven Charts that Show COVID-19’s Impact on Women’s Employment and COVID-19 and Gender Equality – Countering the Regressive Effects
World Bank reports, for example, How is COVID-19 Affecting Women’s Employment? Evidence from the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Labs
Kate Carruthers Thomas’ wonderful graphic novella – Five Survive Lockdown – is definitely worth a buy. You can contact her at thinkthreeways@gmail.com or check out her website.
Plus see the full articles cited in this blog – all open access. Details are:
Cardell, M, Dean, N and Montoya-Williams, D (2020) Preventing a Secondary Epidemic of Lost Early Career Scientists. Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Women with Children, Annals of the American Thoracic Society, Volume 17, Issue 11 (accessed 12 September 2021)
Couch, D, O’Sullivan, B and Malatzky, C (2020) What COVID-19 could mean for the future of “work from home”: The provocations of three women in the academy, Feminist Frontiers
Ibarra, H, Gillard, J and Chamorro-Premuzic, T (2020) Why WFH Isn’t Necessarily Good for Women, Harvard Business Review
Oleschuk, M (2020) Gender Equity Considerations for Tenure and Promotion during COVID-19, Canadian Review of Sociology, August 11 (accessed 12 September 2021)
Acknowledgement
I am sure each of you will appreciate that blog writing is a bit different to my usual mode of academic writing. To help me learn this new craft, I enlisted the support of Judi Goodwin (http://www.judigoodwintraining.com). I can’t thank you enough, Judi, for all your patience and insight. If you like what you see – let her know. If not – I can only say I still have a lot to learn!