Women in heterosexual relationships often do more of the hidden, day-to-day mental labour involved in running a household, and now, technology looks to be compounding the problem.
Analysing data from the European Social Survey across 29 countries, researchers compared technology use between men and women. The findings show how women are handling more of the digital load when it comes to using technology at home, resulting in a “digital double burden”.
“Women still shoulder the lion’s share of domestic labour,” researchers say, adding that emerging evidence shows “the gender division of domestic labour has extended into the digital realm including digital parenting, care provision and online grocery shopping”.
While the data reveals men tend to use technology most at work, women use technology most often between work and family life.
The data shows that among those who frequently work from home, women are more likely than men to juggle medium levels of both work and family digital communication. By contrast, this gendered double burden is not found between women and men who seldom work from home.
This finding has potential implications for women’s wellbeing as well as work-family conflict, researchers say. And while work-from-home arrangements can be seen as family-friendly, this study shows that the double digital burden placed on women cannot be ignored in the fight for gender equality.
The study also notes that an increase in digital use across the globe has likely been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. This could be due to the interconnected nature of work-from-home arrangements that occurred in many households– bridging the digital divide between market and domestic labour. However, the report notes that more comparable data is needed in order for this to be seen as significant.
A person’s nationality was another contributing factor, as findings revealed that in countries with more intense internet use, women are more likely than men to have high family-only and dual-high work-family digital communication, and such gender gaps are not found in countries with a low level of internet use intensity.
“As digital literacy, working from home, and internet use intensity increase further, women may disproportionately take on family-related digital communication and also suffer from a ‘digital double burden’ in work-family life,” researchers said.
In response to the findings, researchers are calling on scholars and policymakers to consider gender equality in the division of digital (communication) labour in national and global agendas to ensure digitalisation benefits women and men equally.