study shows
Why working from home is so much more exhausting for women
Working from home means one thing above all for women: stress.
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Especially at the height of the corona pandemic, many couples had to work from home – as a study now shows, this affected some people more than others.
A 40-hour job including household chores and childcare – many months of the corona pandemic have pushed people all over the world to their limits. how two related studies have now discovered that women in couple relationships with children suffered particularly badly.
In the home office, women consistently have more work …
Both studies took place during the corona pandemic, one in China with 172 married couples, the other with 60 participants in South Korea. In both cases, both partners were employed, some of the couples had children. The result of the investigations: Both men and women completed more family-related tasks when working alone from home (or at least felt they did).
However, men completed significantly fewer family-related to-dos when they and their wives worked together from home. On the other hand, the opposite was the case for women: their family responsibilities did not decrease just because their partner was also at home. So for them, the family-related activities came on top of the professional ones. “There are still some gender differences in the way men and women manage their work and family commitments,” said Jasmine Hu, lead author of the study and a professor at Ohio State University.
… and feel worse
In both studies, the women surveyed reported feelings of guilt because – despite working from home – they had not been able to spend more time with their families. Only in one of the two studies was there pangs of conscience among the men surveyed. Another study confirms women’s tendency to feel guilty because they “do not do justice” to their families. Here, women and men were put in front of a fictitious scenario and were asked to indicate how guilty they felt if they left their sick child with their partner who stayed at home.
The more women in this study believed in gender stereotypes – for example that women are mostly or even mainly responsible for care work – the greater their guilty conscience when they could not live up to these stereotypes. It was the other way around for the men interviewed: the more they believed in gender stereotypes, the less guilty they felt if they left their sick child with their partner who stayed at home.
Gender stereotypes must be broken – but this is a task for current and future generations. What can be done now, Hu suggests: Companies and managers should give their male employees more flexibility in working hours so that they can better meet their family responsibilities, especially in times of crisis. This is particularly important when the woman in the relationship has fixed working hours and has to work in the office. The scientist sees hybrid work – i.e. a mixture of home office and office days – as the future of the working world and for working couples.
Sources used: eurkalert.org, k.at, news.osu.edu, bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com