Digitalisation, Remote Work and Gender Equality: The Role of Unpaid Domestic and Care Work for the Reproduction of Inequalities

The unfolding digital transition has powerful transformative and disruptive effects on labour markets and employment relations. Crucially, these developments do not unfold in a social vacuum, but are embedded in current social structures and are shaped by social relations, including gender relations. Drawing on postulates put forward in particular by feminist scholars, this paper focuses on how changes in employment related to technological developments interact with persistent gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work. While the potential challenges related to the digital economy span many domains, this study focuses on remote work performed in the European context, including both telework arrangements in standard employment and gig work performed online through digital labour platforms. The key characteristic of these arrangements is that the workplace is brought, in general, into a private sphere of a household. In such contexts, the gendered division of labour in the household and gender roles in relation to employment have direct implications for engagement in paid work and the quality of working life.

The empirical analysis is based on two large-scale and representative European surveys: the Internet and Platform Work Survey (IPWS) and the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS). The analysis aims to identify gender differences in remote work, firstly in terms of its incidence and secondly in terms of job quality outcomes. Remote work is considered in terms of opportunities and risks for progress towards gender equality in paid and unpaid work, with a focus on its interaction with the household division of labour. The results show that the impact of digitalisation, which increases flexibility in terms of time and place of work, is firmly embedded in the intersections of occupational segmentation, gender roles and unequal division of labour in the household.