What COVID‐19 could mean for the future of “work from home”: The provocations of three women in the academy

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic saw academic labor rapidly shift into domestic spaces at the same time as households were “locked down.” In this article, we offer an exploration of our own experiences of working from home as women and mothers in the academy. Inspired by feminist approaches to knowledge production and self‐reflection, we each developed a personal reflective narrative guided by three key questions centered on our experiences of working from home pre‐ and during the COVID‐19 pandemic, and what this may mean for the future of our work. We then collectively analyzed how our personal stories reflected different dimensions of the experience of working from home, and our fears and hopes for the future. We present three distilled themes from our collective experiences here with the aim of entering a dialog with others seeking to live feminist lives during this time, and beyond.

Gendered workload allocation in universities: A feminist analysis of practices and possibilities in a European University

“…This seems unhelpful to us as it does to her, for two reasons: first, there is no inherent conflict that we can see between dealing with a pandemic and continuing to address equality or equity, just as there is no inherent conflict between designing a successful organizational structure and increasing equity or equality. Second, perhaps more important, the pandemic has brought issues of in equity and in equality into sharp focus, to take just two examples, compulsory homeworking has shown very clearly how gendered care responsibilities and domestic labor continue to be; and precarity of employment, as shown in gendered patterns of redundancy, is evident in many sectors (including higher education) and economies around the world (Aldossari & Chaudhry, 2020; Cook & Grimshaw, 2020; Couch et al., 2020; Myers et al., 2020; Wright et al., 2020; Yildirim & Eslen‐Ziya, 2020).…”

“…The COVID‐19 pandemic has made manifest and exaggerated gender inequalities in academia. There is a growing volume of evidence demonstrating how the disruption of academic labor has disproportionately impacted women, especially related to the gendered division of domestic and care labor (see, e.g., Aldossari & Chaudhry, 2020; Couch et al., 2020; Myers et al., 2020; Wright et al., 2020; Yildirim & Eslen‐Ziya, 2020). Building on these observations, Pereira (2020) argues that universities need to be held accountable for existing and new inequalities.…”

Researching gender inequalities in academic labor during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Avoiding common problems and asking different questions

“…Smaller‐scale interview‐based studies, like those by Minello et al(2020) and Aldossari and Chaudhry (2020), show how women academics' work during the pandemic was disproportionately constrained by nonacademic responsibilities distributed unequally in households (such as those that relate to care, education, and housework). More personal or autoethnographic reflections offer extraordinarily rich accounts of the actual embodied experiences of working amidst a pandemic and having to manage intense and draining clashes between one's roles as a scholar and one's (gendered) roles at home and in communities (Abdellatif & Gatto, 2020; Boncori, 2020; Clancy, 2020; Clavijo, 2020; Couch et al, 2020; Guy & Arthur, 2020; Hall, 2020; Kelly & Senior, 2020; Miller, 2020; Motta, 2020; Plotnikof et al, 2020; Vohra & Taneja, 2020). These reflections offer compelling insight into the micropolitics of gender inequalities in pandemic academic labor.…”

“…We can draw, for example, on experiences of generating new forms of care and solidarity with one's colleagues and communities (Boncori, 2020; Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020) or on experiences of using technology to create forms of academic exchange that are more accessible and less carbon intensive (Bacevic, 2020; Corbera et al , 2020; Shelley‐Egan, 2020). We might draw, for instance, on our enhanced awareness of the relations of interdependence that connect us to others (Clavijo, 2020; De Coster, 2020; Dobusch & Kreissl, 2020) or the more widespread recognition of the fact that doing academic labor relies and impacts on physical and emotional health (Bebiano, 2020; Clavijo, 2020) and on private reproductive labor (Couch et al, 2020; Motta, 2020; Saldanha, 2020). Transforming academia during and after the pandemic will not be easy or quick.…”

The political is personal: Postfeminism and the construction of the ideal working mother

“…Our contemporary landscapes offer global cacophony of debates, representations, advice, and admonitions lobbed at and about working mothers. Working and parenting has likely never been more discussed in our cultural context than during the COVID‐19 pandemic that shuttered schools and daycares, and rendered countless parents to do the simultaneous “triple‐duty” work of parenting, working, and teaching (Couch et al., 2020; Kelly & Senior, 2020; Miller, 2020; Pereira, 2021; Whiley et al., 2020). This newfound visibility of working and mothering harkens back to longstanding tensions about what it means to be a “good” working mother, and amplifies recent renewed energies around women's shared concerns.…”