Work experiences have always varied based on gender, and it’s looking like those differences can bleed into the home office.
The percentage of US employees logging in from the comfort of their own homes more than tripled since 2019, in what is turning into one of the most important and lasting legacies of the Covid-19 pandemic. But as remote work becomes a norm across societies, some women working from home are finding out that some traditional gender roles can’t be escaped just yet.
In husband-and-wife couples who both work from home at the same time, men end up doing fewer household and family tasks than when they were in the office while women with flexible schedules are discovering they have a lot more chores on their plate than they did before in addition to their regular job, new research led by the Ohio State University found.
The research, published in the Personnel Psychology journal, combines the findings of two separate studies carried out on married dual-earner couples at different stages of the pandemic.
The first study was conducted in China between April 2020 and May 2020, while the second was done in South Korea between June 2021 and August 2021.
The studies surveyed more than 230 couples, some with children and some without, over two-week periods on their remote-work experiences and how their habits changed, finding significant differences in how remote work changed people’s home lives depending on their gender.
“We found that men and women don’t have the same experience working from home,” Jasmine Hu, a professor of management at the Ohio State University and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
The study concluded that when men had flexible work schedules and worked from home at least some of the time, wives who also worked from home found themselves handling significantly more household chores and tasks than before.
