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The Experiences of Indian Couples during the COVID-19 Pandemic

December 6, 2022
By 29781

Priyanshi Chauhan is a 2021 Sylff fellow conducting doctoral research at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. In this article, which is based on a study first published in Gender Issues, Chauhan discusses how gender inequalities have become more prevalent in India under the COVID-19 pandemic. Read on to learn about the ways in which the adoption of work-from-home arrangements has affected men and women differently among dual-earner families in Indian cities.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already existing gender inequalities, with substantial implications on how women navigate the work-from-home settings. One of the ways in which the pandemic has affected women differently than men is through the increased burden of unpaid work. Prior to the pandemic, women in India were already spending more time on unpaid work (351.9 minutes a day) as compared to men (51.8 min/day) (NSO 2019). In addition, women spent an average of 367 min/day on paid activities compared to 486 min/day by men (NSO 2019). Thus, not only do women already bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work, but employed women work for much longer hours than men.

Adding to it, the pandemic has created new types of unpaid work including homeschooling, caring for more people who now stay indoors, and sanitization and hygiene needs, which have added to women’s work. Simultaneously, the pandemic has led to the collapse of spatial separation between the workplace and household due to the adoption of work from home. This is significant because the distinction between paid work and unpaid care work emanates from the site of their performance. As both paid and unpaid work are performed within the household during the pandemic, this is likely to have implications on how men and women navigate work from home. Accordingly, I conducted semistructured interviews with 30 dual-earning married couples in India in the months of April and May 2021 to understand how gender intersects with the experiences of work from home in the household (Chauhan 2022). All participants in the study are from tier-1 metropolitan cities in India: 12 from Delhi, 6 from Bangalore, 5 from Mumbai, 3 from Chennai, and 4 from Hyderabad. All are post-graduates and are working professionals in the corporate sector. Interviews were conducted virtually because of the pandemic-related restrictions. All participants were interviewed separately from their partners. The findings are discussed below.

Sharing of Unpaid Work

Both men and women reported that their time spent on unpaid work increased during the pandemic. However, it would be amateur to conclude that gender inequalities in unpaid work have vanished. It has been found that for men, unpaid work is in addition to activities like relaxation, leisure, and pursuing hobbies, as compared to women, for whom household chores and care work have replaced these activities.

The type of unpaid work that men and women perform can also be categorized as masculine type and feminine type. Men are found to be doing such unpaid work as grocery shopping and laundry, which need to be performed with less frequency and can be done based on their availability and convenience. On the other hand, women are responsible for such work as cooking and related work and cleaning the dishes, which have to be performed multiple times during the day and are time bound. In childcare as well, a distinction is evident where women are responsible for work that is essential to the everyday needs of the children, such as feeding and bathing, as compared to men, who are mostly their children’s playmates or watch over them when their mother is not available. Thus, women play a primary role as household managers and primary caregivers, while men contribute only in supportive roles.

Indian women struggle to maintain work-life segregation. (Source: Freepik)

Navigating the Gendered Space-Time Arrangements at Home

Men also have greater control over the use of household resources, such as a work desk or private workspace. Men’s productive work is prioritized over their responsibilities for unpaid work as well as women’s responsibilities for both unpaid and paid work. Since there is a higher value placed on men’s productive work, the household facilitates their professional commitments in the work-from-home arrangements. Men’s workspace requirements along with their need to maintain privacy and artificial segregation between work and life are prioritized over women’s requirements.

As per the findings, women have a private workspace with adequate infrastructure only in cases where there is enough space to have two separate rooms dedicated to work. The majority of women work from either their bedrooms or the living room. In both cases, women’s allocation of workspaces is contingent on men’s allocation of better workspaces for themselves. For instance, the women who are working from the bedroom have reported that their husbands have a separate private work room. Similarly, for women working from the living room, their husbands have used the limited space in the bedroom to make a workspace for themselves. As such, these women have involuntarily moved to the common spaces to continue working from home. Only two couples in the sample reported men working from the living room and women using separate private workspaces for themselves. This is because even if men continue to work from the living room, they are rarely interrupted by the family. On the other hand, moving to the living room for their wives would mean regular interruptions and expectations from the family members that they are available for them all the time.

Unpaid work is also an important factor in determining women’s schedule of paid work. This leads to the integration of work and nonwork domains not only in terms of physical boundaries but also at the level of behavioral and cognitive boundaries. For men, unpaid work does not determine their scheduling of paid work. Rather, it is the other way around, where their professional commitments determine their availability and participation in unpaid household chores and care work.

Return-to-Work Preferences

There is a preference for the hybrid work model among both men and women. However, there are gender differences in the factors that determine the preferences about returning to work. For women, continuation of work from home is contingent on the availability of domestic workers and other family members working from the office. Factors that are common to both men and women include spending more time with children, work-life balance, and social isolation, among others. Some women also expressed their preference to shift toward part-time jobs or quit the labor force permanently to better manage their household responsibilities. This is because of the increasing challenge of work-life balance that women faced during the lockdown and the lack of support by family members for women pursuing their career ambitions.

Critiquing the Assumption of Gender Neutrality in Work from Home

The experiences thus indicate that the assumption of gender neutrality in the mainstream work-from-home models is misleading. The mainstream models of work from home are popular for providing flexibility and greater control over work. However, when gender is integrated into work-from-home models, it constrains the autonomy of women in deciding when and where to work. The perceived control and autonomy of women in making choices regarding working from home is in itself a product of gender norms and gender roles. Unpaid work is also at the core of boundary management between the work and nonwork domains.

Men have managed to demarcate the two domains to a greater extent, especially for behavioral and cognitive boundaries due to their gender privilege. The relatively high value that is placed on men’s productive work has offered them options to create artificial segmentation in the work-from-home arrangements regarding physical boundaries as well. By contrast, women have experienced a complete merging of the two domains.

It is therefore necessary to mainstream gender considerations and unpaid work in the work-from-home frameworks. In the process, it needs to be underscored that women’s needs in the work-from-home arrangements are not addressed in isolation from the gender dynamics that unfold within the household. Gender equality is not only a woman’s issue but a power relation between the genders. As such, men must be equally engaged in conversations on gender equality both at the workplace and at home.

References

Chauhan, P. 2022. “‘I Have No Room of My Own’: COVID-19 Pandemic and Work-from-Home through a Gender Lens.” Gender Issues 39, no. 4 (December 2022): 507–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-022-09302-0.

NSO (National Statistical Office). 2020. Time Use in India—2019. New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic in the Islands

April 6, 2022
By 30091

Maria Riwana Sahib, a 2012–13 Sylff fellow, looks back on how the COVID-19 situation unfolded in her native Fiji. As has been the case everywhere, the pandemic’s impact on the Fijian economy amplified the issues of domestic violence, unemployment, and xenophobia and affected school education. But the silver lining, Sahib says, has been the revival of the barter system, which has helped many weather the pandemic storm.

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Living in the Pacific Islands has many advantages and disadvantages. It is probably one of the most unsafe places when it comes to infectious diseases. Historically, populations have been depleted by infectious diseases due to our geographical location, that is, our isolation. But COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, has changed the course of history in the modern age of technology and globalization. It has certainly caused a paradigm shift in terms of how we conduct our business and our lives. It is one of the many experiences throughout my life that has been etched in my memory, and as a millennial, it is one of the most interesting times.

Departing Majuro

I have worked and lived in the Republic of the Marshall Islands away from my island home of Fiji for the last seven years. In early 2020, I was contemplating returning home, unsure of my future and unaware of the realities that would follow. The novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic in March 2020, right around when I booked my flight back to Fiji. The flight was during the week in which the Marshall Islands declared that it was closing its borders. Subsequently, all flights going into and out of the islands were canceled. In this haste of closing the borders, many tourists in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, were stranded with no guarantee of the next available flight out. Among the stranded was me! My heart sank as I read the email from Nauru Airlines two days prior to the flight day, in which it provided options for the next available dates of flights going out of Majuro. I felt helpless and frustrated. I remember my friends Laisa, Kelesi, and Melba encouraging me and filling me with positivity. I believed more in their faith than I did my own.

I would like to believe that their prayers and mine were answered, as I sat in the last flight out of Majuro two days later. It was an eight-hour flight with two stopovers before I finally reached Nadi, three hours away from Suva, my home. Although I had come back numerous times before, it had never felt the way it did that day when the plane landed at Nadi International Airport. I was home, finally! The anxiety, the fear, the dreading had all been over, and I felt a weight had been lifted from my chest. I was finally home to see my beautiful daughter. She was initially the reason for my return, but I think the pandemic fueled my decision to return promptly.

Fiji went into lockdown one week after my return, as a case was soon discovered. People immediately went into panic mode, and naturally, panic buying followed. During the lockdown, a curfew was implemented together with movement restrictions and social distancing. These actions resonated with many countries where the coronavirus had spread. This was when reality hit home—that we were as vulnerable as the most developed countries, where the virus had far worse effect. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a way of mother nature telling us that we needed to slow down our development and put a brake on exploiting our natural resources, contributing to the greenhouse effect, and harming our planet.

The economic downturn due to the virus had serious implications for the tourism industry (the largest revenue generator) in Fiji, and this affected thousands and thousands of Fijians. COVID-19 has led to an increase in social issues such as domestic violence, unemployment, and even xenophobia toward the Chinese people. The restriction measures brought out the best and worst in people including me. Fearing for the lives of our loved ones and taking to social media to hit back at people who broke the restriction measures were some of the traits displayed that I am sad about. I, for one, always try to empathize with people and their situations, but during this particular occasion it became clear that the worst in us could be brought out even when we try to the find the best in others.

Sahib and her daughter.

COVID-19 also affected the way education was conducted. My daughter’s private school was prepared to provide full-time online classes, as they already were using online platforms for learning at school. The transition to schooling full-time from home was a big adjustment for both my daughter and me. I am a single parent. Firstly, home is a place for relaxation, and it did not mesh well with the idea of schooling. Secondly, focusing on your own work while supervising your child’s schoolwork can sometimes be challenging when you both have deadlines to meet. It took me a while to adjust myself first before I could start focusing on my child. So instead of writing up a schedule, I followed a routine while flexibly switching the times of doing assignments and researching. My daughter usually had her scheduled Zoom classes (Zoom became a boom in 2020) in the early mornings. That would leave me some time to get my work organized.

I could not help but wonder about those who did not have the convenience of good Internet connections and those who could not afford the Internet. Schools were closed indefinitely as the government kept extending the opening date of normal school hours. The government went into overdrive and maximized their resources to provide subject lessons via Walesi, Fiji’s digital television service. This proved useful but to some extent only; students still had to print their notes and submit assignments at school, which meant mobility and exposure to the virus. The pandemic undeniably brought many social challenges, and it has been an economically trying time for many.

There is always a silver lining in a grim situation, they say. An ancient system was reintroduced in Fiji called the barter system. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith, a Scottish economist, philosopher, and author, argued that markets and economies existed before states. The father of modern economics believed that money was not created by governments but from bartering for goods and services. Anthropologists argued otherwise, saying that exchanges of goods and services occurred between strangers for reciprocity and redistribution. In any case, the pandemic revived this ancient trading system through Barter for Better Fiji, a Facebook page created by Marlene Dutta, a Fijian, in the spirit of giving when money has been tight and employment tough to find. This innovation through the use of technology connected people all over the country and the world, bringing solidarity to the human race in the belief that we are all in this together. This form of trading of goods and services without the use of money has assisted hundreds of people across the nation. For instance, in exchange for goodwill and groceries, six men known as K9E from the western side of Viti Levu, Fiji’s largest island, provide services ranging from indoor work such as maintenance, clearance, painting, moving homes, and light plumbing work to outdoor work such as grass cutting, farm preparation, backyard land cultivation, chicken shed construction, flower bed preparation, cutting, trimming, and pruning of trees, firewood collection, and fishing.

It has not all been hunky dory as far as the bartering goes, as there have been reports of dishonesty and fraudulent services. One of the challenges of dealing with strangers is that there is risk involved. Nevertheless, it has brought to many the assistance they desperately needed. Bartering has even assisted university students who suddenly had to stay home and study remotely. Although there has been a huge economic downturn in Fiji and across the globe, bartering has helped many to survive this pandemic.

One can only hope and pray that we can all bounce back from our situations and improve in 2022. Our new normal is the one in which we need to collectively support each other during a time of crisis, and perhaps bartering is a result of the new normal.

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