Spatial and temporal segmenting of urban workplaces: The gendering of multi-locational working

Abstract

Existing urban research has focused on gender differences in commuting patterns to and from homes, but has paid little attention to the gendered diversity in the spatiotemporal patterns of work. The increase in remote working and information and communications technology (ICT) work has been emphasised, but at the cost of exploring the full range of workplaces and multilocational working observed in urban areas. This article develops a new classificatory system to analyse the spatiotemporal patterns of work in European cities using the 2015 6th European Working Conditions Survey. We identify 12 distinct spatiotemporal work patterns of full-time workers and investigate gender differences across these patterns against the backdrop of occupation, industrial sector, employment status, household composition and ICT use. Findings show that women are far more likely to be restricted to only working at the employer/business premises while men have more varied and complex spatiotemporal patterns of work. Multi-locational working rather than working at one workplace is a largely male phenomenon. Working exclusively at home is still a rarity, but combinations with employer premises and other workplaces are more common. We conclude that workplace research has been blinkered by narrow concerns of advances in mobile technologies and has been blind to the pervasive effects of spatiotemporal divisions in the working lives of men and women. The methodological and theoretical implications of this new perspective on workplaces for urban development and research are discussed.

Changing workplace geographies in the COVID-19 crisis

“…These differences in working at or from home are unlikely to be solely sectorial effects. Burchell et al (2020) found that within European urban areas there is a significantly greater likelihood of working from home in Scandinavian countries (including in Sweden for which we do not have data in Figure 1) and a lower likelihood in the Mediterranean and transitional countries when industry sectors were held constant. It is much more likely that high proportions of workers who can potentially work at or from home coincides with national policies of flexible working and gender equality legislation.…”

“…Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, telecommuting was largely implemented as a flexible working arrangement to enhance worker productivity and well-being (Menezes and Kelliher, 2011). However, as the term ‘telecommuting’ implies, the ability to work from or at home is associated with the high use of information and communication technologies (Burchell et al, 2020; Ojala and Pyöriä, 2017) and therefore varies substantially across sectors. Jobs in financial, professional, and technical services are more likely to be performed at or from home as communication with co-workers and customers can be done electronically.…”

New spatialities of work in the city

“…Burchell et al (2021) also use a novel concept of workplace location that measures where people work and how often they work in a particular type of place, including the home, employers’ premises and public spaces. This concept is less detailed than the one suggested by Shearmur (2021), but is able to sufficiently capture the concept of ‘multi-locality’, which the authors can measure on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.…”

The surge in homeworking and new key issues for regional studies

“…3% of employees are estimated to have worked exclusively from home pre-COVID-19 (Reuschke and Felstead, 2020). This proportion was lower still in urban areas where people rather worked sometimes but not all of their time from home (Burchell et al, 2020).…”

“…This regional variation in the prevalence of homeworking is related to occupational and industrial disparities. Since working at home is facilitated by technological connectivity, its take-up varies by occupational characteristics (Burchell et al, 2020). Jobs in financial, professional, and technical services are more likely to be performed at home in contrast to high service and labour-intensive work (Felstead and Henseke, 2017).…”