Coronavirus: How working from home will reshape many women’s lives — again

Working from home is up-ending the structures that have seen women able to enter the workforce during the past few decades.

Illustration: Johannes Leak.

After years of talk but less action on flexible work, a global pandemic took the matter out of everyone’s hands as millions of workers still lucky enough to have a job fled their formal workplaces to the home office.

It has been a radical — and novel — shift for some but, for others, working from home will be profoundly transforming in the long term.

For many women, working flexibly has long been a necessity — and home has always been a workplace, complete with deadlines and crises, of the unpaid and undervalued variety.

The new reality as families hunker down under the same roof day in and day out can’t help but reshape many women’s lives, perhaps permanently. Some childcare centres are closing, along with schools and after-school care, while older relatives need more support.

In this environment, WFH is up-ending the patterns and structures that have seen women able to enter the workforce in growing numbers during the past few decades.

Call it balancing, juggling or simply surviving, this ricocheting between pressing paid and unpaid obligations has hinged on lots of adaptability and support from market structures.

Overnight the options built up across decades to meet demand for paid care have virtually disappeared. Caring is suddenly back in the unpaid realm — where the onus is usually on women to do more of the work.

In the short term some women could find their workload doubled (at least) as they care for children and parents 24x7, along with home schooling and holding down a job.

According to British writer Helen Lewis, in an article published in The Atlantic last month: “The coronavirus smashes up the bargain that so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: we can both work, because someone else is looking after our children. Instead, couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.”

That’s likely to be a woman, Lewis says, not only because of social norms but also because women can quickly step into the breach as they are more likely to be paid less and working fewer hours anyway.

In the short term some women could find their workload doubled (at least) as they care for children and parents 24x7, along with home schooling and holding down a job.

Although WFH has been described as flexible until now, and a way to manage competing demands, there’s not much choice and lots of time demands for most employees now.

While there may be less to pay in school and care fees and fewer last-minute trips for pick-ups, those savings will be at the expense of much else — including the capacity to do your job for a few hours without interruption.

Predictions are not all gloomy however.

There should be much better employer awareness about the realities of working parents according to Emma Walsh, who founded consulting firm Parents at Work in 2007.

She counts Westpac, PwC, Lion, Optus, and QBE as clients.

“I doubt work will ever be the same again,” she says.

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“The way we do it and respond to requests for flexibility and adapt … parents are used to doing this every single day.”

— Emma Walsh, Parents at Work

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The routine pivot to take care of families while in the workforce wasn’t acknowledged much until now, she adds.

Parents and particularly women have worked out their own systems and were told it was their problem to solve, she says, but now everyone is affected.

Instead of facing suspicion they were slacking off, women who work from home are now part of the new mainstream and many partners have a clearer picture of what each other does.

Some men will get a sense of what their partners do around the home and some women will see first-hand the pressure of their partner’s job, Walsh says.

But she is worried.

“My fear is that we’ll go backwards and (some will say) ‘let’s divide and conquer and you look after the kids and do the home schooling because my work is more important than yours’,” says Walsh.

“If you are both working from home it will become obvious what the tension is around the division of labour — with a backdrop of financial pressure — and that is concerning.”

We have already seen a spike in domestic violence and the federal government has allocated some of its emergency funding to address the problem. More divorces are also predicted as the pressure mounts on households.

In Britain, author Christine Armstrong, whose book The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career, was released in 2018, has been interviewing dual-income families grappling with the lockdown.

“They seem to be splitting work and childcare fairly equally,” she says. “I don’t want to overplay this because I still get a sense that in many cases the women are doing a lot of the thinking/emotional labour, for example meal planning, homework timetables, gathering ideas for new activities and possible outings. My hope, possibly optimistic, is that the virus will give everyone who is used to being out all day the chance to engage more at home and see both the challenges and pleasures of being more involved in family life.”

One mum of three who spoke to Armstrong said her husband always wanted the kids to do a lot of sports and other activities beyond school, which she usually facilitated. But now he is home he is realising that the children value rocking around at home and that the reduced pressure is good for everyone. Another dad whose partner does most of the childcare admitted he was taken aback by how demanding the role was now he was also trying to do some.

“There is a chance that, in some homes anyway, this could be a path to greater equality of caring,” Armstrong adds.

The pressures of managing caring and paid jobs, which has made flexibility synonymous with women’s work, has been a focus for a range of experts well before the pandemic made it topical.

In the late 1980s the term “mommy track” was coined to describe the kind of jobs many women with children had little choice but to end up taking. Writing in the Harvard Business Review at the time, Felice Schwartz defined it as a phenomenon “in which women with family responsibilities are shunted into dead-end, lower-paying jobs”.

The description included not only low-income and casual jobs, part-time and other flexible work, but also certain roles within organisations, such as marketing and HR. These arenas became known as the “pink ghetto” because they were female dominated, less prestigious and therefore less likely to lead to career progression.

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“Home hasn’t caught up to new ways of operating. We should expect to see that change as couples and families start to work that out.”
— Troy Roderick, former head of diversity at Telstra

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All these factors, not surprisingly, resulted in poor outcomes for women’s incomes, with pay plateauing after children because of a “motherhood penalty”.

The trade-off women make between caring and a job has been a continuing focus for US writer and commentator Anne-Marie Slaughter. Her 2012 article “Why women still can’t have it all” in The Atlantic outlined why something had to give for most women who were trying to keep working while also staying on top of things at home.

A few years later her book, Unfinished Business, further examined the strong gender stereotypes that persist about who is better at what she describes as caring and competition.

Ensuring an “ungendered” workplace means we need to look at the home, which is also deeply gendered, she told this paper shortly after the book was launched.

Slaughter’s plea was that in future “we would never again talk about working mothers — it would be working parents, or working children — and we would assume that everyone would likely have care obligations at some point in their career”. Ideally, Slaughter said, “a couple would figure that out and it would no longer be seen as a women’s issue but as a workplace and economic issue that everyone has a stake in”. Her comments seem particularly pertinent now.

Even before the pandemic, Australian data showed that while the workplace was doing better on providing flexible work options, there were still high levels of work-life conflict, particularly for women, says diversity and inclusion consultant Troy Roderick, former head of diversity at Telstra. Now that partners are seeing each other’s lives we could see that change.

“Home hasn’t caught up to new ways of operating,” he says. “We should expect to see that change as couples and families start to work that out.”

Roderick is optimistic that remote working will offer some new and effective models.

Of course flexible work is not meant to be a substitute for childcare. But in the present climate the demands on parents will mean some latitude is needed, particularly around the core hours of work.

Instead of 9 to 5 (or 7 to 7 in some cases), a day may start to look like two sets of working hours, possibly swapped between partners, with a longer break in the middle to accommodate kids and home schooling.

Along with extra childcare demands, many employees could find their hours are cut as the shutdown continues. It’s possible the traditional Australian pattern of a primary earner working full time (usually a man), while their partner is in part-time work, could shift to a PT-PT model. In theory that could mean a different roster for domestic work too.

How all of this works out is obviously still being navigated. But we have the chance to redesign WFH, says Walsh, because workplaces will be making adjustments in the future too.

“Managers who say no to flexibility will find it difficult to defend that in the future — the right to request flexibility will be rethought,” she adds. And so will the frequency of team meetings, travel and conferences — possibly permanently. People will remember what happened and what worked well in the crisis, she notes. That includes a younger generation who might not have got the chance to work remotely but are now routinely navigating this new model. And attitudes are likely to shift as we see a much broader range of roles successfully managed in this way and not just the jobs that were on the “mommy track”.

Even those after-work drinks and footy discussions from which many women have felt excluded have been temporarily jettisoned or moved to more accessible online catch-ups. This could affect workplace politics and dynamics — and promotion prospects. A recent study published in Harvard Business Review found more men were able to advance faster under male bosses because they were able to schmooze more easily.

It’s early days, but the next few months could show that, in the future, work can be more flexible and agile, that core working hours can be less regulated, meetings and travel less frequent.

It could even mean productivity and outcomes are more accurately measured. That’s all potentially pos­itive for many wom­en. But it depends on whether changes on the domes­tic front finally see more sharing of chores so women can take advantage of the new norms and no longer have to shoulder more of the burden that once saw them racing from work to pick up kids and now involves being surrogate teachers.

History shows cataclysmic global events do rewrite social norms. It happened after World War II when women left the workforce initially, but a couple of decades later were flocking into education and jobs. It didn’t all occur smoothly or quickly but it could happen again.

Catherine Fox is a commentator on women and work. She is author of five books, including Stop Fixing Women: Why Building Fairer Workplaces is Everyone’s Business, which won the 2017 Walkley Award for Women’s Leadership in Media.