Remote Work and the Unequal Division of Care in Milan. 

A large body of research shows that remote work facilitates work-life balance. There is no doubt that this impact is particularly significant for parents of young children, who constantly struggle to combine their professional lives with unpaid care work performed at home. Hybrid or fully remote work arrangements, whether as employees or freelancers, do indeed give parents more time to look after their children and households. Yet, my ethnographic data suggest that the benefits of remote work are not equally distributed. When women have most care responsibilities while working in precarious jobs, remote work becomes an additional source of pressure and distress rather than a solution to work-life conflicts. 

So far, I have included twelve research participants from eleven different households who are also parents of young children (in one family, both partners worked remotely). I met with them either individually or with their partners. Each household had its own specific arrangements, but in some cases, the combination of remote work with child and household responsibilities negatively affected research participants’ well-being, and the participants who experienced these negative effects were only women. 

For example, Anna is a married 40-year-old woman and mother of two who works as a freelance graphic designer for two main clients. The main one is a large Italian publisher, with which she has worked for over 15 years. She did not choose to be a freelancer; she would rather have been employed, but she was never offered such a position. In her situation, freelancing was largely perceived as a formalised system of precarity and exploitation. A decade earlier, many of her colleagues had become company employees, but she had not. Continuing to work as a freelancer, however, also offered the advantage of being able to work from home and decide her own working hours. 

When her first child arrived in 2018, she appreciated working from home even more. Not having to go to the office seemed like the best way to raise her child, considering that the grandparents and her husband were mostly absent. Then her second child was born. She kept the same remote freelance job, but her pay decreased, while her colleagues began building their careers because they were employed and worked from the office (almost) every day. But she thought: “Well, at least I can work and breastfeed at the same time!” Going to the office every day would have been impossible with two young kids. 

“I didn’t want to drop my children off at a day-care for 10 hours a day or leave them with a babysitter at such an early age, but this choice significantly affected my mental health and self-confidence! I am constantly dealing with this internal conflict…”  

When the children grew a bit and started school, Anna’s working day run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., but her work also included grocery shopping, tidying up, cleaning the house, and preparing dinner. Her husband worked in a different city and was never home. Struggling with this unresolved internal conflict, Anna never looked for a new job and became increasingly frustrated with her work situation. Her husband eventually found a hybrid remote job near home, and Anna can now work until 6 p.m. one day a week, when her husband works from home, picks up the children from school, and takes them to their after-school activities. The distribution of family and care work is now more equal between the two parents, but Anna remains deeply unhappy with her precarious working arrangement and the lack of better job opportunities. She is also clearly exhausted after seven years of professional and care work. She told me:  

When I am sad and angry, I think that this remote job ruined my life. When I am happy, I think that thanks to this job, I could enjoy the best years of my life by spending time with my young children!” 

Laura is another working mother. She is a 46-year-old communication strategist whose situation is quite similar to Anna’s: she receives no help from the grandparents, and her husband is barely involved in childcare and housework. Laura, too, always looks exhausted. She accepted a remote freelance job with some frustration, mostly because it allowed her to combine her professional life with motherhood. Laura, exactly like Anna, is unsatisfied with her work and life arrangements. During one of my visits to her home, I counted how many times her six-year-old child interrupted her while she was working on an ordinary weekday afternoon. From 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., the child interrupted her mother 11 times, forcing her to switch continuously between professional and care tasks. When I left Laura’s home, I thanked her. She asked me what interesting data I had collected, and I replied: “I counted how many times your daughter interrupted you in one hour today. It was more than ten!” I assumed that this number might have shocked or surprised her as much as it had surprised me. But it didn’t surprise her at all! She simply replied that it could be even worse.  

The stories of these two households show that remote work does not necessarily make women happier. When care responsibilities are not shared with partners, remote freelance work is characterised by high levels of insecurity and low income, and government policies to support working parents are lacking; remote work simply places additional pressure and stress on women. Remote work reproduces gender inequalities by reinforcing the unequal division of care and household work.