As many of us worked from home during the pandemic, it became evident that things were not particularly equal, even among dual-earner couples. There has sadly been copious evidence of the toll remote working has had on women during the pandemic, with many taking on far more than their fair share of domestic duties alongside the challenges involved in shifting to a remote style of working.

Research from the University of Nevada finds that the various tools provided by employers to aid remote working have scarcely helped, and indeed, in many instances have actually made the stress and mental toll even worse.

The researchers quizzed several hundred employees who had been working remotely for ten weeks during the first wave of the pandemic.  The analysis found that stress levels rose considerably among women with children, with the authors arguing that this was likely due to the considerable blurring of their work/life balance.

Husbands get the better deal

This is further reinforced by a recent study from Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, which shows that when both partners work from home, husbands tend to do better than wives.

The research reveals that husbands tend to do far fewer family-related tasks when their wives also work from home than when they’re working from home and their wives are working at the office. For the wives, it didn’t matter where their husbands were working.

What’s more, wives also felt a greater level of guilt about spending time with their families and failing to perform housework if they did return to work at the office.

“We found that men and women don’t have the same experience working from home,” the researchers explain. “There are still some gendered differences in how they manage their job and family responsibilities.”

More interruptions

There are also important differences in terms of how productive men and women can be when working from home, as research from UConn shows that women face more interruptions in their work when they work from home than men do.

“The gender divide was particularly surprising to us. We had heard anecdotally that it occurred, but now we have empirical evidence that women are interrupted more frequently, both with work-related and personal responsibilities,” the researchers say.

“Women have paid an additional price since the onset of the pandemic,” they continue. “This is more than just an inconvenience. Work interruptions are associated with reduced employee performance and higher levels of emotional exhaustion.”

The researchers quizzed a few hundred employees from a range of industries, all of whom were working from home in the United States. Each participant was a knowledge worker with either children or other dependents at home and with a spouse or partner.

An unequal burden

Across the board, the respondents reported an increase in interruptions since the pandemic began, but the nature of these interruptions had changed significantly.

“We found that the burden of interruptions was not shared equally, as women reported higher levels of all types of non-work interruptions, suggesting that women experience more fragmented time than men,” the researchers explain.

This was even the case when both partners were working from home, with most of the household burden falling on the woman. This translated into an increase in interruptions for women, which was a situation that was already present before the pandemic, but exacerbated during it.

While the interruptions for family-related reasons could be predicted to a certain extent, women also reported suffering from more interruptions from colleagues and managers when they worked from home.

More flexibility needed

These findings demonstrate that husbands could significantly help their wives when they work from home by performing more household tasks, especially when their wives have a more rigid work schedule.

When the boundaries between personal and professional lives become more blurred, however, there is a greater likelihood of conflict between dual-earner couples. Indeed, while a scenario in which both couples worked from home means that more work is done, it significantly raises the sense of inter-role conflict, which comes with a psychological withdrawal from work and even a sense of guilt towards their employer.

“Managers should form realistic expectations about how much work their remote working employees can effectively handle and show more understanding of the home working situations of dual-earner couples,” the Ohio researchers explain. “Organizations and managers should give their male employees more flexibility when possible so they and their families can better adapt to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.”