Monalisa PATRA, Surendranath College for Women, India
Monalisa Patra, M.Sc( Geography Major), M.Phil (Regional Planning and Development)
State Aided College Teacher
Surendranath College for Women
Domestic work has always been a gendered space and the very perception of domesticity has a different connotation for male and female. During Covid 19 pandemic, terms like lockdown, quarantine, home isolation and social distancing came to random use globally. The complete lockdown imposed due to the pandemic has completely shut down schools, and daycare centres, and compelled many companies to implement work from home, bringing both the genders together under the same roof 24x7, simultaneously questioning the distribution of household labour between them. Therefore, the intertwining of official work along with household chores and caregiving responsibilities has become a common scenario. The continuous struggle to cope with both paid work and unpaid domestic work at the time of crisis, had a probability to play the role of ‘gender equalizer’ in the society, thus bridging the stereotype of domestic work space as a typically women’s work. This paper is based on an online survey including four hundred urban couples of different age-groups from Kolkata, West Bengal, India to map their domestic work space through the lens of gender. The survey showed a stunning result making the question of understanding the perception of domestic work division relevant and contemporary. This paper explores how the naturalization of hierarchy of gender roles makes women completely unaware of the burden of unpaid domestic work and on the other hand men perceive it as a leisure work. The paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the domestic work division and the very perception of it and point out the marginalisation faced by working women within the household.
Mots clés : COVID19|domesticity|gender|workdivision|marginalisation
A105164MP