The HomeWork Project: gender inequalities in the reconciliation of teleworking and cohabitation concluded that women spend the same number of hours as men in paid work, but devote more time to domestic and care activities.
This study, whose final product was a White Paper with recommendations in this area, which was presented today in Porto, aimed to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on reconciling work and family life and, by integrating a gender perspective, aimed to contribute to improving the Portuguese legal system and/or public policies to promote equality between women and men.
In this project, empirical studies were carried out which provided access to professionals’ experiences and organizational perspectives regarding the reconciliation of teleworking in a cohabitation/family context.
Rita Grave, a researcher and one of the authors of the project, told Lusa that “people are very satisfied with teleworking and want to keep this model”.
However, “women spend the same number of hours as men in paid work, but devote more time to domestic and care activities,” so “for women, the benefits of teleworking seem to lie in the gains for reconciling work and family, while men seem to derive individual benefits (with more personal contributions, leisure and gym, for example), which translates into a reinforcement of traditional gender roles, with detrimental effects on women’s well-being,” she said.
The White Paper, which is unpublished in Portugal, advocates, among many recommendations, the use of reminder systems for taking breaks and alerts when the number of working hours planned for the day has been exceeded.
It is also recommended that each employer draw up a code of conduct on teleworking and include it in their internal regulations.
It is proposed that this code should be publicized and should explicitly identify the communication channels and rules to be used in teleworking, limits on interactions, as well as reporting mechanisms in the event of non-compliance.
The challenges of reconciling work and family life while teleworking differ according to gender and can condition workers’ choices, and can also aggravate situations of domestic violence, which is why the team of researchers recommends that “the issue of teleworking be integrated into materials and programs to promote gender equality and prevent violence against women, addressing the risks and benefits of this type of teleworking”.
“This idea of a White Paper is a document to be sent back to the state, with recommendations for our country’s public policies. It’s a set of recommendations that indicate precisely the issue of promoting gender equality and conciliation at the level of three vectors, which are people, the state and institutions, that is, at different levels, so that they can propose measures to promote gender equality, social justice and the issue of conciliation,” said Liliana Rodrigues, one of the project’s coordinators.
The set of proposals aims to address the negative effects of teleworking, which fall disproportionately on women, and to promote gender equality in teleworking as well.
This research, which in the first phase took place between March and July 2023, surveyed 341 people who work from home and in cohabitation, and in the second phase, from July to September 2023, a case study was carried out in a national company, which included semi-structured interviews with 11 managers of the institution.
The HomeWork Project, funded by the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism EEAGRANTS under the Conciliation and Gender Equality Program, was developed with the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality, as the program operator, and promoted by the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto.
Its partner countries were Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, with the collaboration of the national companies Ascendi and CGTP and the Norwegian company Fafo.
