Working from Home and Work-Family Balance: A Study of Women Educators during Lockdown

Introduction

Much time has passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic and it is one of the most unprecedented upheavals that has affected lives and livelihoods, beyond imagination, with massive lockdowns in place to check the virus. Masks, sanitizers, and social distancing are the new normal, and so is work from home. Working from home is an abrupt change for millions of people. There is still significant doubt over how we will live, work, and thrive in the future. Is this a transient change or a forever shift? Will we go to work again? If yes, how often? Will a “hybrid” way of working be the norm?

While millions were working from home, lockdown had different implications for men and women, with women feeling the heat more than their male counterparts. A recent McKinsey study (Madgavkar, White, & Krishnan, 2020) suggests that globally, women constitute 39% of the workforce, but account for a staggering 54 percent of pandemic-driven layoffs. A major reason for the more serious impact on women is that in the absence of domestic help, the lockdown significantly increased the burden of unpaid care, which is primarily carried by women. It was arduous for working women to manage the twin roles of immediate domestic work and an equally demanding remote office.

Pandemic-imposed lockdown is an exceptional and unprecedented circumstance that has major implications for work-life balance, though normal times pose an almost equal challenge for women who are part of the workforce, given the obvious need to integrate family and work (Sturges & Guest, 2004). Studies indicate that women’s employment rates are expected to surge as high as 361 per 1,000 women by 2026 (McNay, Unni, & Cassen, 2004). A rise in the numbers of single parents, dependent parents, and dual-career households, and an increasingly aging population has led to a consequent increase in research in the domain of work-life balance for women (Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997).

The paper is organized in four parts. The first reviews the extant literature on work from home and the resultant work-life (im)balance. The second consists of a quantitative study of a sample of 150 women educators who were forced to work from home owing to the imposed lockdown. The third part is an exploratory study of 30 volunteers, chosen from the 150 respondents mentioned above. Using semi-structured interviews, the respondents were interviewed in depth regarding their experiences of work from home, work-life balance issues, challenges faced, and coping strategies adopted. The final section discusses the emerging themes obtained from the respondents’ narratives in light of the existing literature on work-life balance. The paper will lead to an understanding of how women educators perceive and manage work-life balance during a pandemic-mandated lockdown.

Literature Review

Covid-19 has made work from home ubiquitous. While more educated individuals and those working in technology-aided organizations could work from home, not all organizations were amenable to the working-from-home transition, and employees working with such organizations were forced to go jobless (Bick, Blandin, & Mertens, 2020). A recent Deloitte (2018) report indicated that the majority of millennials look for an opportunity to work from home. Finn and Donovan (2013) concluded the same in a global generational study of women. Singley and Hynes (2005) concluded that flexibility at work can be used as a “positive capability spanning resource” for women by helping them cope with work and family demands simultaneously. Chung and Van der Horst (2018) suggested that work from home permits mothers to pursue their careers even after childbirth. Women can retain their jobs and strike a good work-life balance by being able to take care of work and family (Erickson, Martinengo, & Hill, 2010). Work from home arrangements can thus be viewed as a tool to achieve gender equality in our society (Fuller & Hirsh, 2018).

Although working from home translates into autonomy over when one works and where one works from (Kelly, Moen, & Tranby, 2011), the arrangement is viewed differently by different scholars. Rau and Hyland (2002) asserted that working from home reduces conflict, as it gives employees an opportunity to manage the mutually conflicting demands of home and work. Working from home relieves work-family conflict (Allen, Johnson, Kiburz, & Shockley, 2013; Kelly et al., 2014; Michel, Kotrba, Mitchelson, Clark, & Baltes, 2011). Delanoeije and Verbruggen (2019) proposed that work-from-home arrangements would be more effective for women who have enormous pressures at home. They prefer integrated work-home boundaries for the simple reason that working from home enables them to address their home pressures with ease.

Kurland and Bailey (1999) opined that work from home leads to greater conflict, as being at home means proximity and accessibility to family and, thus, additional pressure to meet their random demands along with planned office responsibilities. Jasrotia and Meena (2021) in their study used Judith Butler’s “Standpoint Theory” and “Theory of Performative Action” to decode gender roles and work-life balance in a family setting. The results revealed that although the spouses of these women shared some household responsibilities and took care of their children, the onus largely lay with the women. A majority of women educators reported that they had to devote a substantial share of their time to caretaking chores, thereby compromising job efficacy. Such compromises invariably lead to work-life conflict. Chung and van der Lippe (2018) also supported Kurland and Bailey (1999) by asserting that women working from home are expected to assume more responsibility for domestic work than men. This could prove detrimental to gender roles in an inflexible patriarchal culture like India, and fewer women would be able to continue as part of the workforce. This has much to do with our pre-existing learned behaviors regarding gender roles and gender-related norms for both genders and their consequent roles (Lott & Chung, 2016). Lott and Chung (2016) suggest that men use work from home to enhance their performance, committing more hours to work and eventually earning more income, while women working from home are expected to be more responsible toward the family by virtue of the fact that they are at home (Hilbrecht, Shaw, Johnson, & Andrey, 2008), leading to an increase in work-family conflict. Ten Brummelhuis and van der Lippe (2010) reported that household structure had a bearing on family-work conflict, as employees who were single enjoyed working from home, while employees with families and children to care for found it stressful.

The boundary between work and home becomes blurred when one works from home. This permeability and convergence of the two disparate environments (work and home) generally entails more multitasking and competing demands, leading to more conflict rather than achieving balance (Glavin & Schieman, 2012; Schieman & Young, 2010). Nuwer (2016) proposed that working from home has absolutely no effect on work-life balance, while Golden, Veiga, and Simsek (2006) reported that workplace autonomy, flexibility to schedule work, and household size moderated the relationship between working from home and conflict. Peters, Den Dulk, and van der Lippe (2009) confirmed that female workers achieved better work-family balance when they had more autonomy and control over their work schedules and scheduling of work.

Thus, paid work encroaches upon unpaid family chores and, consequently, family life as a whole (Glass & Noonan, 2016). This feeling of overt obligation toward employers and thus adhering to a “more than the ideal” worker culture is also a gendered feeling (Acker, 1990). To substantiate this, Knight and Brinton (2017) suggested that even after childbirth, men are expected to continue with breadwinning roles, while women are expected to do household chores and be caregivers for family and relatives. Dotti Sani and Treas (2016) proposed that such normative views about the role of men and women and a gendered division of labor have a bearing on the outcomes of flexibility in working from home. A plethora of qualitative studies have confirmed that when women opt for flexible working, such as working from home, they are expected to perform domestic chores simultaneously by their spouses and other relatives around them (Hilbrecht, Shaw, Johnson, & Andrey, 2013; Shaw, Andrey, & Johnson, 2003; Sullivan & Lewis, 2001).

Clark (2000) argues that a woman working from home essentially operates between the two flexible borders of work and home. The boundaries between the two borders often become obscure, and one sphere often expands at the cost of the other. The strength of the domain that the individual identifies with and prioritizes the most helps her decide the course of action. If a woman values paid work over family chores, the flexibility will result in expansion of the work sphere, and if the woman values family over paid work, then an expansion of domestic chores is imminent.

Mental health was another aspect massively affected by Covid-19-imposed working from home. An online cross-sectional survey comprising 537 responses received from female professionals working from home revealed that mental health was severely and moderately affected in 27% and 27.5% of participants, respectively (Sharma & Vaish, 2020). Subha, Madhusudhanan, and Ajai Abraham (2021) investigated occupational stress in a remote work setting and identified enormous workloads, poorly designed work environments, job insecurity, personal problems, and absence of structure as major stressors for female employees in the IT industry in Bangalore while working from home (Singh, 2021).

Aczel, Kovacs, van der Lippe, and Szaszi (2021), in their study of 704 academics, noted that while 50% of the respondents reported being less efficient at work during the pandemic, 25% reported being more efficient. Feng and Savani (2020) reported that before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were “no gender differences in self-rated work productivity and job satisfaction.” However, women reported lower productivity and job satisfaction than men during the pandemic. Efficiency was compromised in tasks that required collaboration, discussion, interaction, and incorporation of diverse viewpoints, while tasks that could be done “in silos” were done more effectively when working from home.

Vyas and Butakhieo (2021) suggest that the shift to working from home was abrupt and reactive. It was an unplanned move, and thus, organizational directives did not exist to guide employees in the situation. Most employees were largely unaware of what working from home entails and lacked the resources, information, guidelines, technology, and software to execute the change. This initially caused decreased efficiency, leading to stress and work-life conflict in the initial stages of mandated working from home.

Research Gap and Study Objective

The pandemic has enforced a mandatory work-from-home regime. Although not all jobs can be performed remotely, some do lend themselves to remote performance. This is especially true for managers, professionals, and other white-collar workers. It has been established that employment does not mean working at a pre-designated location for pre-decided work. A technology interface enables working from wherever one is and at whatever time one finds appropriate (Messenger & Gschwind, 2016). This shift augured well for knowledge workers, especially during the pandemic.

This study addresses gaps in the existing literature. First, although many studies have been conducted on working from home and work-life conflicts, the studies focus on voluntarily working from home. However, lockdown-mandated working from home is a relatively new and compulsory phenomenon. Covid-19-related anxiety and fears of being furloughed dominate the situation. More conscientiousness is needed in the workplace at a time when domestic help is conspicuous by its absence. This study is one of the first on the issue of imposed working from home and work-life conflicts among women educators.

Second, the working from home discussed in the extant literature is planned working from home, which, by virtue of being planned, does not need elaborate coping strategies. The current study addresses sudden, abrupt, and unexpected working from home, for which no organizational directives, mandates, training, and resources are available. Thus, this study adds to the existing body of knowledge on imposed and unplanned working from home.

The present study examines how women educators adapted themselves to moving from brick-and-mortar to virtual classrooms under mandated work-from-home circumstances. The study seeks to make a unique contribution to our understanding by achieving the following objectives:

• 1. Understanding how mandatory working from home made women educators structure their domestic workspace in order to be able to work from home;
• 2. Understanding the impact of women educators’ home environment on their work situation and vice versa;
• 3. Understanding the impact of mandated working from home on women educators’ work-life balance and factors affecting work-life balance while women work from home; and
• 4. Understanding the experiences of women educators while they work from home.

Methodology

Working from home mandated by a lockdown is a unique global event, making it an exclusive and unexplored issue. It provides a perfect opportunity for exploratory research to uncover the unique dimensions of women educators’ experiences in managing family and work during the lockdown. The study was conducted in two phases:

Phase 1: Descriptive research based on primary data collected from women educators teaching online in B-schools in Rajasthan. The choice of respondents is apt, as B-schools were in the news for the quick response they demonstrated in moving all their teaching-learning processes online. The respondents had a reasonable experience of working online and hence were ideal for the study. Judgment sampling was used (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to locate respondents who qualified as work-from-home women educators since the lockdown was announced and had sufficient experience of doing this. Thus, only a sample size of 150 could be achieved, as not all institutes had shifted to online teaching and not many women educators had experience of working from home.

Findings of the Descriptive Study

Table 1

Age

Table 2

Marital Status

Table 3

Income

Inference: It is evident from the data that 21 women (14%) earn less than Rs 20,000 per month, 49 (32.7%) have a monthly income between Rs 21,000 and Rs 50,000, and 37 (24.7%) had incomes greater than Rs 50,000, but less than Rs 1 lakh. Forty-three (28.7%) have a monthly income of more than one lakh (100,000 rupees).

Table 4

Education

Inference: Of the 150 respondents, 6 (4%) are graduates, 69 (46%) are postgraduates, 68 (45.3%) hold PhDs, and 7 (4.7%) have professional degrees.

Table 5

Experience

Inference: Forty (26.7%) had 1–5 years’ experience, 22 (14.7%) had 6–10 years, 24 (16%) had 11–15 years, and 64 (42.75%) more than 16 years.

Table 6

Household Support

Inference: Before lockdown, 69% of women were supported by family members in household chores, but during lockdown, 91% of women said that help was extended by other family members. Women educators responded that during the lockdown, in the absence of any domestic help, family members also contributed to doing household chores. Ninety women (60%) said that major help came from their spouse, as he was also working remotely, while 31 women (20.7%) reported that parents and in-laws also served as helping hands. Fifteen women (10%) confirmed that children also helped them in household work. Two (1.3%) women reported help extended by the siblings, while 4 (2.7%) had help from domestic servants, which was mostly from maids staying with them even before the lockdown was imposed. Eight (5.3%) were largely unsupported and had no load sharing of any kind. Husbands were the major support in helping with household chores, followed by parents/in-laws. This shows the shifting equations in Indian households, where men also share responsibility for doing household chores.

Table 7

Work from Home Intentions

Inference: Eighty-one women (54%) always wanted to work from home (even before the pandemic-mandated lockdown), while 69 (46%) never wanted to work from home even before the lockdown.

Table 8

Reasons for Work From Home

Inference: Those having an inclination toward work from home cited reasons like multitasking (49; 32.6%), flexibility (43; 28.7%), taking care of family members (36; 24.0%) and convenience (22; 14.7%) as the perks of working from home.

Table 9

Work Hours during Work from Home

Inference: In total, 38% of women reported doing around four hours of office-related work, 68 (45%) 5–8 hours, and 25 (17%) more than eight hours.

Table 10

Increase in workload during lockdown

Inference: Of the 150 respondents, 108 (72%) felt that lockdown had increased their overall workload, while 42 (28%) did not find any change.

Phase 2: Exploratory research was based on the responses of Phase 1 respondents who volunteered to be part of the focus group discussions. The sample was compiled based on the willingness of the respondents to volunteer and a sample size of 30 was chosen for Phase 2. It was a heterogonous sample that included women of varying ages, experience, career life-cycle stage, marital status, parental status, family size, and household structure. This phase of the study was a semi-structured in-depth interview with each of the respondents.

Table 11

Demographic data of respondents of qualitative research (Phase 2)

This study used a semi-structured interview protocol. It covered topics such as educational background, years of experience at work, family size, number of dependents, workplace responsibilities, family responsibilities, social support received at work, social support received at home, and challenges faced during the forced work-from-home regime. The women were encouraged to express their feelings about the changes in working conditions and the coping strategies that helped them achieve work-life balance. Additional follow-up questions were asked to ensure adequate probing of the issues uncovered. The narratives were recorded as handwritten notes, which were transcribed immediately after the in-depth interview to ensure that every part of the discussion was incorporated into the findings. In any cases of uncertainty, clarification was sought through telephonic conversations. Themes were drawn from the respondents’ narratives using Grounded Theory coding procedures (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Inductive analysis (Janesick, 1994) was used to identify categories and emergent patterns.

The in-depth interviews focused on the following research questions:

• 1. How do women educators separate home from workplace while they work from home?
• 2. How has working online affected the feelings of women educators and their family?
• 3. How does their home environment affect their online work?
• 4. How has work from home affected their work-life balance?
• 5. How have they aligned themselves to the reality of the virtual workplace?

Findings of Semi-structured In-depth Interviews

Research Implications

The research addresses the issues faced by women educators during a forced, unplanned, and uncertain period of working from home imposed by a pandemic. The study has far-reaching implication for workplaces. Academic administrators need to focus on training their faculty by organizing networked live training programs on how to use various platforms and their benefits for students and faculty alike. The study has multiple instances of women educators reporting feeling of isolation. Workplaces need to devise ways of addressing these feelings by virtual meetings to instill feelings of unity and belonging. Kaduk, Genadek, Kelly, and Moen (2019) suggested that these are troubled times, leading to abrupt changes in work practices. This creates uncertainty for employees, making it necessary to have consistent communication about roles, expectations, performance, workloads, and access to human resources support. Fílardí, de Castro, and Zaníní (2020) suggest that organizations need to train managers to supervise work-from-home employees.

Shareena and Shahid (2020) suggest empathy and workplace social support need to be extended to one and all, irrespective of household structure. Most workplaces have work-life policies aimed primarily at employees with a family, and singles generally fall outside the scope of such policies (Young, 1999) but these policies need to be all-encompassing. Most importantly, workplaces need to evolve and embrace long-term changes to enable female employees to achieve a good work-life balance.

This study also has several social implications. The findings suggest that society should lend additional cooperation to women working from home, taking care of dependents and children during lockdowns and when schools and daycare centers are closed.

Conclusion

The objective of the current research was to understand how women educators coped in response to the shift from brick to click classrooms. The questions that followed were about organizing work and home simultaneously, the impact on work-life balance, and eventually the entire gamut of experiences during mandatory work from home. Phase I was essentially quantitative and Phase II was qualitative, and narratives led to the emergence of five themes: structuring the home environment for work, workplace social support, personal social support, household structure, and feeling of isolation. All the themes that emerged found plausible support from theory and the extant literature. While some women educators valued “flexibility,” others disliked the blurring of the boundary between home and office. While there were mixed reactions, the overall experience of most women educators was not one of excitement. Exciting initially as it may have been, drudgery crept in after a few months in the absence of a separate work environment and a family not ready for a sudden, mandatory, and unplanned work-from-home regime. The study findings have serious implications, for modern workplaces and for society.

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