Unpacking women’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: a feminist analysis of mainstream print media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores mainstream print media depictions of women’s work during COVID-19 and associated lockdowns in India. Specifically, it aims to understand perceptions of educated upper- and middle-class women regarding remote working arrangements during the pandemic. It delineates two broad themes that emerge from an analysis of selected articles in four national dailies; first, many women regarded these arrangements as mutually beneficial for women employees as well as their workplaces, and its counternarrative characterised by women having to juggle paid and care work with little support from the family, market or state. The paper then unpacks the arrangement of work from home that emerges in the media analysis and offers a critique of the simplistic and binary understanding of flexibility, choice, and agency sustained by the neoliberal and postfeminist framing of pandemic work arrangements. Our analysis provides a feminist critique of these dominant perceptions that invisibilise the complexity and heterogeneity embedded within women’s experiences. Finally, the paper reiterates the urgent need to consider the structural factors that undermine gender equality across work and home; and pushes for a rethink of neoliberal and postfeminist notions of ‘flexibility’, ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ through the intersecting lenses of gender, labour, care work, and time.