What 'Work-From-Home' Really Means For Women: Negotiating Fairness In A Post-Covid World
Photo by Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash
Written in conjunction with Akytech, an official TFW partner.
As we enter the post-pandemic world and all the changes which have followed our year in isolation, more and more people have been discussing the possibility of embracing new, less formalized ways of working and achieving organizational goals.
One of the ways this could happen is through widespread work-from-home policies and allowances. Many leaders and professionals view working from home as preferable for a number of personal and economic reasons - but what’s missing from the conversation is a nuanced discussion of how permanent work-from-home norms would look for women as opposed to men in our still-gendered world.
We have made great strides toward sexual and gender equality as a society in recent decades, but the reality is that many divisions and challenges still remain.
When we talk about working from home and how that might benefit or harm professionals, we have to keep in mind the lived experiences of the individuals who will inhabit that changed professional landscape - especially the experiences of women, who have traditionally been viewed as synonymous with the very concept of “home” and what it means to exist almost exclusively in that private space.
Women Are Weary: The Lasting Impact Of ‘Homemaker’ Expectations On Today’s Female Professionals
For much of human history, it was taken for granted that women lived most of their lives in the realm of the home. Early feminists viewed this as the “private” end of the social spectrum, as opposed to the “public” end, which was ruled over by men.
Housework, childcare, food preparation, home management, and many other tasks were dumped in the laps of women and largely ignored by their male counterparts. And even when equality became a major goal for most of our societies, the advances women made did not always translate into matching reductions in the work they performed within the “private” sphere.
In short, women were now expected to manage all the same things they had before, but now with the addition of a career outside of it.
This is by and large the experience most women have today.
Studies show that working women - those who hold full or part time jobs equivalent to what their male partners do - still take on 51-58% of household work in their families. They are still doing the laundry, cleaning the house, planning the menus, cooking the food, driving the kids to school and extracurricular activities, and purchasing household goods for their homes...on top of their paid work and career obligations.
In addition to this labor, women also take on more of the social labor that holds communities and extended families together.
This work, often called ‘emotional labor’ in popular dialogue, is comprised of things like remembering birthdays, calling up sick or grieving friends, planning family or other events, organizing holidays, comforting upset children, placing important dates on calendars, buying presents, and generally forging and enhancing the social bonds that define community life for their families.
An offshoot of this imbalance is the tendency for women to occupy the broader “caretaker” role far more often than their male counterparts. Generally speaking, women are the ones who end up looking after the sick or the elderly in their families and communities, and women are the ones who often take on the responsibility of providing more inclusion for those with disabilities or cognitive differences.
“In short, women were now expected to manage all the same things they had before, but now with the addition of a career outside of it.”
All of this is in addition to, rather than in lieu of, the paid work that women do. The result? Women are tired. Exhausted, really. Women are more likely to report chronic fatigue, chronic stress, and associated health problems than men.
When we talk about permanently switching to a work-from-home model in either private or public industry, we cannot afford to ignore this reality.
Even women themselves may forget the implications of one-dimensional work from home policies on their own lives at first, as we are as excited as anyone else about the idea of less commuting and a freer schedule.
If these workplace changes happen without due consideration for the ways in which women’s labor is different than that expected of men, however, it won’t be long before the mental and physical effects start to make themselves known.
Policy changes and normative shifts in this arena can indeed bring positive new lifestyles to men and women, but first we need to consider how we can balance the often-different realities of each gender with this new ideal.
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Women And Work: Radical Change Doesn’t Happen All At Once
When third and fourth-wave feminism took root in the Western world, we saw real change occur on the policy and legal level. Progress in the realm of inclusiveness, equity, protection by and from the law, and access to opportunity became noticeable, and this was and still is a cause for celebration.
There’s more to the story than this initially rosy image, however. While great improvement has been made to women’s circumstances on a purely legal basis, social change does not always follow the same trajectory. It often takes longer - sometimes much longer - to see society’s ideas about women shift to match these institutional changes.
One of the major complicating factors on this frontier is that of unconscious bias, which refers to our unintentional conceptualization or stereotyping of people based on their identifying characteristics.
“During the pandemic, many women have been tested to the breaking point by competing home-versus-work demands. ”
We’ve begun to discuss this on a broader scale when it comes to matters like race or sexuality, but it’s important to remember that unconscious bias still has a major impact on how women are viewed, both in conjunction with and separately from other factors.
This bias plays out in the workplace, and it also takes on subtle forms within our social groups and interpersonal relationships. When we combine these areas through a work from home policy shift, existing biases hold the potential to interact and form new barriers to women in both arenas.
When we talk about working from home, there is an implicit assumption that “work” and “home” have two separate and distinct meanings. For women this is not always the case. The work we do at home can easily blend with the work we’re paid for, and the burdens borne in the spaces where our labors mix can be heavy indeed.
During the pandemic, many women have been tested to the breaking point by competing home-versus-work demands.
Complicating factors like changed childcare schedules and availability, spousal job loss or simultaneous use of the home for paid work, a lack of social outlets, and general anxieties about the safety and wellbeing of loved ones have formed a hurricane of stress that many women find hard to handle.
We’ve seen the loss of productivity and the negative mental health impacts of these burdens firsthand, and we need to remain cognizant of them when we talk about switching to a work from home model as the permanent “new normal.” Vaccination and the “opening up” of economic strongholds may help with some of them, but other challenges will remain firmly in place - in fact, some of them have always been in place, and the pandemic simply highlighted them in a more visible way.
Thinking of the pandemic’s impact on women’s work and health not as a unique phenomenon, but rather as a magnification of problems that already existed can help to bring things into perspective for workplace policymakers and leaders.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
Woman Cannot Live On Ideals Alone: Allowing Room For Reality As We Negotiate A Shared Professional Future
Awareness is the key component needed in any realistic, inclusive, and healthy work-from-home policy change. Understanding the demands that already exist on women in the home means crafting a policy that makes allowances and provides support to them on a level that most men may or may not find necessary.
Does this mean that work from home policies are off the table? Not at all. It simply means that our optimism and hope must be tempered by a realistic assessment of our collective circumstances.
When we think about permanent work from home arrangements, we tend to picture peaceful, productive hours of comfortable work. Most people like being at home - the majority of Americans prefer working from home (at least part-time if not full time) to working in an office, and there are plenty of good reasons for that preference.
Because of this preference, it can be easy to stick with this appealing mental image and forget the less savory aspects of our recent experiences.
We remember our fondness for wearing pajamas from the waist down during meetings and forget the miscommunications that happened when all of our meetings were performed on Zoom, rather than face-to-face.
We remember the convenience of rolling out of bed and heading for our home office, but forget how difficult it was to stop working and pay attention to our families once the clock struck 5pm.
We remember the way it felt to be freed from cubicle life and disruptive colleague “drop-ins” but forget how frustrating it was to deal with screaming kids, demanding pets, frequent “where did I put…?” interruptions, and connectivity issues while working remotely. Women have felt these impacts on a greater scale than any of us would have expected, and we can’t ignore them just because the pandemic lockdown is ending.
“Understanding the demands that already exist on women in the home means crafting a policy that makes allowances and provides support to them on a level that most men may or may not find necessary.”
Those who haven’t experienced all or any of these setbacks are more likely to dismiss them and remain ensconced in their optimistic vision for the work from home future, but this is doing their colleagues and organizations a major disservice. Cultivating empathy is vital when we negotiate inclusive and equitable remote work policies for ourselves.
Inclusive policies keep in mind things like school hours and childcare, the particular need for schedule flexibility for women on a level that may be greater than what’s required for their male colleagues, funding or allowances for small-scale home modifications to help separate women’s all-too-integrated “work” from their “homes” in a physical way, the need for accessibility benefits to help women caretakers balance their loved ones’ needs with their organizations’ demands, and other matters that impact the ability of female employees to maintain productivity while working remotely.
No organization is a monolith, and different employees will have different needs, but there needs to be an effort to answer the most pressing ones that women have historically been forced to either ignore or handle on their own without support. True equality, after all, is nuanced.
The first step toward achieving it? Asking women to weigh in and lead the effort.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
The Context Of Our Conclusions: Remembering To Listen When You Would Rather Argue
If you ask ten employees what their ideal remote work policy would look like, you’re likely to get ten different answers. Still, good leadership means spotting the patterns that start to emerge when real dialogue is encouraged.
Organizations have a responsibility toward women workers that goes beyond platitudes. Real equity may not always look strictly like “equality,” because equity is about accepting differences instead of attempting to smooth them over. Women experience work and home differently: so leaders need to become familiar with those differences and integrate genuine conversation into their policy initiatives.
Because so many people want widespread work from home policy shifts, those who express concerns can feel dismissed, drowned out, or even attacked by those colleagues who don’t wish to tolerate anything that might threaten their hopes for a permanent remote-work future.
It’s the duty of workplace leaders to make sure that the minority gets their say in a real, constructive way, especially when that minority is made up of women who know all too well how much their reality can differ from the images people hold of them. Male leaders need to be cognizant of their unconscious biases, which can take on insidious forms that color their leadership approaches in unexpected ways.
We tend to assume that women are simply naturally inclined to “do it all,” and that bias is extremely harmful. Even female leaders can fall prey to this assumption, as they themselves may be so accustomed to a highly-burdened, fast-paced lifestyle that they take for granted the fact that other women are simply used to living the same way.
Ignoring the voices of exhausted, worried women in the workplace means plummeting productivity, low morale, higher turnover rates, increased healthcare costs, and many, many other negative impacts that may or may not be harder to see on a surface level. Working toward a work from home norm means listening when women point out that for them, home is work.
If we start from a standpoint of open communication and understanding, we can all reach a future where women and men are more fulfilled by their careers. It’s up to everyone to see that future make its debut...both in and outside of our homes.
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