No Room of Her Own: Gendered-Spatial Analysis of Work-Family Conflict during COVID-19

Abstract

The present study proposes a gendered spatial theoretical perspective for studying the work-family interface of employees working from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on interviews with fifteen professional heterosexual couples, working in fulltime jobs, with children under 18 in Israel, we present three gendered spatial strategies employed by the couples in order to meet the challenges of home-working during the first quarantine, when both parents were forced to work from home while simultaneously taking care of their children. First, a gendered division of the space: the domestic space was unequally divided, with men occupying the private, distant, and comfortable parts of the house, while women worked near the children, often in the kitchen or living room, where they had no privacy or quiet. Second, controlling work time: time was unequally divided, with men working during standard work hours with few disruptions from the children, whereas women more often worked afternoons and/or nights, with fewer options to display their visibility and accessibility to work. Third, bodily gendered practices to mark work-family boundaries: the penetration of work into the domestic space has generated a new gendered form of bodily regulation that forced many women (and not men) to use their bodily appearance as an aesthetic disciplining dictate, as means to separate the private from the public sphere, and as a way to defy the organizational invasion to the private home. The findings show that these gendered strategies are reproducing the gendered division of labor and inequality between partners.