Work from home better for husbands than wives, reveals a new study

Women often struggle with managing home chores, child care, and office work. They often have to pitch in way more than men when it comes to household work, so the results of a recent study are not that unusual. It found that men have a better work-life balance due to their work-from-home jobs. A study carried out by the University of Ohio found that mothers who work from home do a lot more household chores along with their office work whereas that's not the case with men when they do work from home. Moreover, in dual-income couples in China and South Korea, when women worked from home, husbands tend to take up less family-related work compared to when their wives went to offices.

The researchers conducted two surveys for the study during Covid-19. The first survey included 172 married dual-income heterosexual couples in mainland China who had at least one child. The second survey had 60 dual-income heterosexual couples in South Korea, some had children and some didn't, according to The Huffington Post. Moreover, the study stated that women tend to feel more guilty when they are unable to accomplish housework or spend time with family while they are doing their office work. Jasmine Hu, lead author of the study and professor of management at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business said, "We found that men and women don't have the same experience working from home." 

She added, "There are still some gendered differences in how they manage their job and family responsibilities." Hu said that these findings basically suggest that husbands can "provide more resources and support for their wives to complete remote work tasks when they have flexibility in scheduling their work time and procedure.” 

According to Hu, this study could become a good conversation starter for women who think that their husbands are not helping out much around the house, and also for managers who do not want families to have burnout. "Organizations and managers should give their male employees more flexibility when possible so they and their families can better adapt to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic," Hu said, as reported by Scary Mommy.

Remote working has obviously become a norm post-Covid. "People have really gotten used to the benefit of working from home and many won't want to go back to the office full-time," said Hu. She added that hybrid work is the future for couples. "This will allow employees to have the flexibility they get from working at home, while also having the opportunity to interact more with colleagues at the office, which can increase collaboration and inspire creativity and innovation," she said. “We believe that our findings can be generalized to post-crisis times,” Hu said. “For the foreseeable future, the COVID-19 crisis can dramatically change how employees work and how dual-earner couples fulfill work and family duties.”

This is not the first study to talk about what moms go through. A study conducted by Yale in 2020 showed that women with children who worked from home were more likely to have symptoms of burnout and depression than husbands who had flexible schedules.