Award for gender studies for the paper Work and Family in the Home Office? Contested Intrafamily Division of Labor in the Corona Crisis

8 December 2022

The article Work and Family in the Home Office? Contested Intrafamily Division of Labor in the Corona Crisis wins the Gender Prize of the WISO Faculty! Laura Lüth, doctoral student in the project Sorgetransformationen and at the Department of Sociology of Economic Action, wrote the article together with Almut Peukert, Miriam Beblo and Katharina Zimmermann. Every year, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg awards the Gender Prize to outstanding papers and theses of the faculty that deal with gender issues. The paper asks whether a "re-traditionalisation" or a "modernisation" of the intra-family division of labour occurred in the context of home office regulations and daycare and school closures during the Covid 19 pandemic. The authors elaborate both modernisation and re-traditionalisation efforts, but by placing them in existing academic debates in welfare state and home office research as well as in the sociology of couples, they are able to show that it is primarily existing gender inequalities that become visible. Using the example of the Covid 19 pandemic, the study thus makes clear the necessity of a differentiated, interdisciplinary and multi-methodological consideration of gender inequalities in the intra-family division of labour.

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Abstract: Work and Family in the Home Office? Contested Intrafamily Division of Labor in the Corona Crisis
Social inequalities appear to be growing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both worldwide and between women and men. This paper discusses opposing theses with regard to intrafamily divisions of labour: the risk of retraditionalisation and an increase of gender inequality on one hand and the opportunity for modernisation on the other. This paper systematises different strands of academic discourse and empirical findings on intrafamily divisions of labour and gender (in)equality. Against the backdrop of location-independent, time-flexible working in the digital home office, and welfare state interventions, this paper concludes there is a simultaneous push for modernisation on a large scale, and a persistence of traditional gender dynamics on a small scale.