The remote working that has become widespread during the Covid pandemic has had a well-documented impact on the work-life balance of employees, and especially of female employees, who have recorded working longer hours on top of additional domestic chores, such as homeschooling children and caring for relatives.

It’s a narrative reaffirmed by research from the University of Turku in Finland, which highlights the blurred boundaries between work and family responsibilities during 2020.  The researchers examined the work-life balance of Finnish parents during the first lockdown in 2020.

The researchers found that women, in particular, were struggling to effectively draw boundaries between their work and family life, especially if they were unable to effectively negotiate an equitable distribution of work and childcare responsibilities with partners.

“Home was changed into a multi-function space, meaning that it was a workplace, daycare and school at the same time. In addition, the mothers were struggling with several simultaneous roles: They had to juggle work, childcare, home school, cooking, laundry and cleaning the house. In some families, mothers also undertook the so-called metawork, meaning the responsibility for planning the family’s everyday activities and seeing them through,” the authors say.

Striking a balance

Where both parents had moved to remote work, the researchers also found there was a struggle negotiating the spatial boundaries at home so that there was adequate space for both the parents’ remote work and also the homeschooling of children.

The respondents said that they tried to set up quiet workspaces wherever they could, even if that meant doing so in the sauna. If finding such a quiet space for both parents wasn’t possible, it was usually the mother who was required to adapt more than the father.  For instance, this would often mean working from the kitchen or another space shared with the family.  This would often mean that children assumed their mother was available, even if she was working.

Suffice to say, this wasn’t the case for every family, and some did report greater success in dividing responsibilities more equitably so that equal opportunities to work were arranged for each parent.

“In order to agree upon the daily and weekly “work shifts” between the spouses, some parents made “family timetables” which included the work and school assignments of both parents and children. The negotiations between parents on who is responsible for childcare and homeschooling were based on the timetable. If both parents were working from home, the daily “work and childcare shifts” were divided, for example, according to the parents’ mandatory work tasks, such as meetings, or so that in the mornings the other parent was working and the other taking care of the children and vice versa in the afternoon,” the researchers say.

The researchers believe that the pandemic laid bare the gendered practices that dominate society.  What’s more, it also highlighted the crucial role the welfare state plays in the everyday lives of people with children.

“Some of the mothers said that the childcare responsibilities had been unequal already before the pandemic, but they had not experienced it as a great issue,” they explain. “It could be that, in normal circumstances, the mother’s greater responsibility in childcare is less visible and does not challenge the negotiation of the boundaries between work and family in the same way as these responsibilities are shared with the support services and institutions provided by the welfare state, particularly with the school and daycare system. During the coronavirus lockdown, most families lost this support and the increased care and other tasks were shouldered by the mothers.”