**1. Introduction**

With the sudden rise of homeworking during the pandemic [1,2], many scholars ask whether the expansion of homeworking can encourage a more equitable division of domestic tasks among heterosexual couples, and increase men's involvement in housework and childcare [3–7]. In fact, one key goal of the expansion of flexible working rights was to enable more gender egalitarian outcomes both at home and in the labour market [8]. Some scholars argue that there is a danger of further traditionalisation of gender roles through the expansion of flexible working [9]. This is because while women increase their time spent on housework and childcare when working flexibly [10,11], men rarely do [12,13] and end up working longer overtime instead [14–16], which can exacerbate gender inequality patterns in the labour market. Of the different types of flexible working arrangements (FWAs), working from home (in this paper working from home and homeworking is used synonymously) seems to be more problematic compared to flexitime [12,13,17,18]. This is because working from home allows more boundary blurring between work and non-work lives, and more permeability between the two spheres [19].

One reason why men do not use the flexibility and permeability in their work to engage more in domestic work is because of the dual stigma they can potentially face [20].

**Citation:** Chung, H.; Seo, H.; Birkett, H.; Forbes, S. Working from Home and the Division of Childcare and Housework among Dual-Earner Parents during the Pandemic in the UK. *Merits* **2022**, *2*, 270–292. https://doi.org/10.3390/ merits2040019

Academic Editors: Randal Joy Thompson, Chrys Egan and Tina Wu

Received: 28 July 2022 Accepted: 29 September 2022 Published: 12 October 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Workers using FWAs for family purposes may face a 'flexibility stigma' [21]. This is when employers and co-workers believe that flexible workers (including those who work from home) are less productive and less committed to the workplace compared to those who do not work flexibly (work in the office). Due to such beliefs, flexible workers can consequently experience negative career outcomes [22–25]. Scholars argue that men using FWAs for care purposes further face a 'femininity stigma' [20] because such practices also go against the masculine breadwinner image that is prevalent in our societies. However, these associations are not inevitable. The context in which FWAs are used can drastically shift how they impact gender equality outcomes [13,17,26,27].

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed provide us with a unique real-life quasi-experimental setting to test how the changes in contexts can shift the gendered outcomes of homeworking. In the UK, as a part of the lockdown measures to contain the virus, working from home was enforced by the government and subsequently employers. This led to a surge in homeworking, with up to half of the total workforce working from home during the first lockdown [1]. Workers working from home were less likely to be singled out and penalised, and negative connotations towards homeworking reduced drastically [28–30]. In this paper, we use unique data gathered during the peak of the first lockdown in the UK to explore the association between homeworking and the division of domestic work among dual-earner heterosexual couples with children. We focus on homeworking in this paper, as evidence shows that it can be more problematic with regard to the potential traditionalization of gendered division of labour compared to other types of FWAs. What is more, homeworking has expanded significantly during the pandemic and this pattern is likely to remain even as the pandemic winds down, leaving many to ask how such rise in homeworking will relate to gender relations in the future [3,4,31]. More specifically, we examine how father's homeworking relates to the increased involvement in routine and non-routine housework and childcare during the pandemic, and how it relates to the division of housework and childcare. We look at both measures as previous studies [5,6,32] have shown that even when fathers have increased their time spent on childcare and housework during the pandemic, this did not necessarily lead to an equal division, as mothers have equally increased their time.

Results of this paper show that the increased prevalence and normalisation of homeworking may have enabled fathers to use homeworking to engage more in childcare and housework and carry out a more equal share. However, we still see evidence of the gendered outcomes of homeworking. Homeworking mothers also increased their time spent on housework and childcare, and carried out a larger share during the lockdown. We also find evidence that only when both parents were working from home, fathers engaged more in/carried out more of an equal share of home-schooling than when fathers were at home on their own. The paper contributes to the on-going debates around homeworking by evidencing that although the expansion and normalisation of homeworking helps, that alone is insufficient in addressing issues around the unequal division of domestic work, enhancing women's labour market participation, and improving gender equality at work [33]. Through this, the results of this paper provide implications for better understanding the potential gender inequality patterns in the post-pandemic labour markets.
