Gender, remote work and disaster capitalism

Amid the rhetoric about how to ‘build back better,’ we need to be more vigilant than ever

I thought I was fairly up-to-date on the ways in which the pandemic has been especially hard on women.

We know, for example, that rates of domestic abuse have gone up by as much as 30 per cent in some countries. We know that, as default carers, women have had to fill in more of the gaps in child care and elder care. As default parents, and the ones who are more frequently the stay-at-home parent, they’ve done more of the home-schooling. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’m talking about the majority — this is the picture being drawn again and again around the world.

We also know that those in poverty and those making minimum wage are more likely to get COVID-19, and women outnumber men in both those categories.

But I was chatting with my friend Sarah, a former executive director who’s been applying for jobs during lockdown, and I realized that there’s been a whole other world of trouble brewing for women during the pandemic — women who are fairly privileged in the grand scheme of things. Time after time, Sarah said, she’s been interviewed by mostly men, who start off talking about remote working in sympathetic tones: it’s unfortunate that it’s necessary, but they all pull together to make it work. Or: it requires such patience and flexibility and co-operation, but after all, they’re lucky to have any work at all in the current climate. And then, when Sarah asks for specifics about what kinds of accommodations they’re making for parents who are working from home with children who are learning at home, the tone shifts: the expectation is that employees will work early mornings, late evenings and weekends; they’ll be available on a variety of different tech platforms using their own devices, electricity and working space. “Expressions like ‘always on’ and ‘blitz scaling’ are being bandied about as if they were badges of honour,” she texted me. “When haven’t women been ‘always on’?!”

Ultimately, she said, the interviewers all seemed to think that working from home was an opportunity to squeeze more productivity out of people who were so grateful to have employment that they’d meet these extra demands.

My friend Lorraine, who runs a yoga studio and who, therefore, spends a lot of time communicating with middleclass women, recently observed how many traditional heterosexual marriages used to have some balance because of the man’s time spent commuting.

In other words: if the husband spent three hours a day commuting, or had to work late or take a meeting on the weekend, this was a kind of sacrifice he made that compensated for the wife doing the majority of the housekeeping and childrearing, and/or taking a part-time job beneath her capabilities and ambitions so that she could have time to do the housekeeping and child-rearing. Now, working from home, has he taken up more of the housekeeping and childrearing? “Oh darling, forget it,” Lorraine said wryly.

The very fact that these anecdotes are so familiar and so stereotypical — the very fact that traditional gender norms have proven so difficult to change — makes it all the more frightening that the lockdown could pull us backwards from the small amounts of progress that were being made toward gender equality and better “work-life balance” for everyone.

I’d like to think that more men and women occupying more time at home together, has contributed to greater equality and understanding of just how difficult it can be to run the home front. But that’s not what I’m hearing from those around me. Let me put it this way: will greater work flexibility — a shift away from the office paradigm — be better news for men than women?

But really, all of us — no matter our gender identity — need to be aware of the ways in which the pandemic will be used by corporations and governments to explain why we should accept less progress, less fairness, less pay, less equality and fewer services. On top of that, there is the social instinct to shrink back into what’s traditional and familiar when faced with the kind of social disarray and dislocation we’re facing now.

This is the essence of disaster capitalism: it’s easier to take advantage of people — particularly those who are marginalized to begin with — when they’re mired in loss and uncertainty. So, amid all the rhetoric about a “reset” and how to “build back better,” we need to be more vigilant than ever.