Stuck between the ideal worker and the bread winner: experiences of motherhood and work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India

• Date: 03 October 2023
• Pages: 825-848
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-08-2022-0213
• Published date: 03 October 2023
• Author: Priya Kataria,Shelly Pandey

Stuck between the ideal worker

and the bread winner: experiences

of motherhood and work during the

COVID-19 pandemic in India

Priya Kataria and Shelly Pandey

Goa Institute of Management, Sanquelim, India

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to study the experiences of middle-class working mothers from the

ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service) sector in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their

experiences of work from home are studied in the backdrop of the ideal worker model at work and the adult

worker model at home. Further, the study aims to identify the need for sustainable, inclusive practices for

working mothers in Indian organizations to break the male breadwinner model in middle-class households.

Design/methodology/approach –A qualitative approach to collect data from 39 middle-class mothers

working in MNCs in four metro cities in India. The semi-structured, in-depth interviews focused on their

experiences of motherhood, care and work before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings –The pandemic made it evident that the ideal worker model in organizations and the adult worker

model at home were illusions for working mothers. The results indicate a continued obligation of the “ideal

worker culture”at organizations, even during the health crisis. It made the working mothers realize that they

were chasing both the (ideal worker and adult worker) norms but could never achieve them. Subsequently, the

male breadwinner model was reinforced at home due to the matrix of motherhood, care and work during the

pandemic. The study concludes by arguing the reconstruction of the ideal worker image to make workplaces

more inclusive for working mothers.

Originality/value –The study is placed in the context of Indian middle-class motherhood during the

pandemic, a demography less explored in the literature. The paper puts forth various myths constituting the

gendered realities of Indian middle-class motherhood. It also discusses sustainable, inclusive workplace

practices for mothers from their future workplaces’standpoint, especially in post-pandemic times.

Keywords Motherhood, Adult worker model, Ideal worker, COVID-19, Inclusive workplace

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

The structure of home and work life changed substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic

because home turned into a workspace for nearly two years. The Information Technology

Enabled Service (ITES) sector organizations across the globe came forward in implementing

technological advances, assisting in setting up a workspace at n home and providing

flexibility in work routines during the crisis (Bartsch et al., 2020). There has been a significant

shift in India with more women joining the I.T. workforce, and middle-class women constitute

the 30% segment of this workforce (Vidya, 2023). However, the studies on working from

home during the pandemic through the lens of motherhood have not been adequately

researched in the Indian ITES sector.

In India, the ITES sector promptly made work-from-home arrangements in order to

sustain the productivity of its employees (Patanjali and Bhatta, 2022). However, women who

were initially managing work and home as separate spaces suddenly lost the boundary

between the two spaces. Their homes which were already marked by the definitive demands

of domestic and care labor from them, now overlapped as their workspace for their full-time

jobs, disturbing the spatial boundary of the previous work-life balance (Dubey and Tripathi,

2020;Petts et al., 2020). The literature discussed that global organizations took initiatives

catering to their employees’needs during the worldwide crisis. Initiatives such as health

Experiences of

motherhood

and work

825

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 15 August 2022

Revised 24 December 2022

28 February 2023

31 May 2023

25 August 2023

Accepted 2 September 2023

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 43 No. 5, 2024

pp. 825-848

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-08-2022-0213

management, setting up digital communication systems at home and mental health breaks

were popular during the lockdown in work-from-home (WFH) situations (Bick et al., 2021;

Boiral, 2021;Goyal and Dangwal, 2022). However, the extant literature argues that for

working mothers, the WFH dynamics were more stressful and challenging during the

pandemic as they had to manage more than their other colleagues who were either single or

were fathers with minimum household responsibilities (Cummins and Brannon, 2022).

From a working mother’s lens, COVID-19 and domestic work only decreased their

productivity and increased their work-life conflict (Collins, 2019;Collins et al., 2021). A large

amount of literature published between 2020 and 2022 highlighted that, across sectors,

working mothers faced distress: managing care, domestic labor and WFH schedules all by

themselves (Whiley et al., 2021;Cummins and Brannon, 2022;Guatimosim, 2020). A few

studies done in 2021 and 2022 also observed that at the onset of the crisis, the home space

shifted back to traditional gender roles (G€

uney-Frahm, 2020;Collin et al., 2021;Rania, 2022). In

households with children, especially young ones, the care work drastically interfered with the

work-life balance of a working mother (Schieman et al., 2021). The new structure of WFH

during the pandemic acted as a penalty to the working mother (Miller, 2021;Fairlie et al., 2021;

Mart



ınez and Ort



ız, 2021). While the mothers felt penalized, fathers were encouraged to only

focus on full-time work. As male members of the family, there was a minimum to no

obligation to do domestic chores (Haney and Barber, 2022). However, some studies on fathers’

experiences stated their willingness to contribute to care and domestic work, but the ideal

worker expectations during WFH did not allow them to do so (Arntz et al., 2020;Andrews

et al., 2022).

All of the unpaid care work was managed by women or mothers in the family. This

traditional division of family duties put a disadvantage to the work-life balance of working

mothers whose home and care happened to be in the same place during the COVID-19

pandemic (Cummins and Brannon, 2022). This resulted in an increase in gender inequality for

working mothers at both work as well as home (Dias, 2020). Organizations believed that

technological advances saved them during the pandemic, but they overlooked the situation at

home for working mothers (Fairlie et al., 2021).

Scholars have documented the experiences of mothers during the pandemic at the global

level. For instance, studies conducted in the USA, Germany and the UK during the COVID-19

pandemic reported working mothers’stress and deranged work-life balance during their

WFH schedule (Cannito and Scavarda, 2020;Ashman et al., 2022;Cummins and Brannon,

2022;Li et al., 2022;Zanhour and Sumpter, 2022). The detailed analysis of a matrix created by

motherhood, care and work during the pandemic has also been documented in the global

south. In Latin America, childcare work has resulted in evident gender gaps, impacting the

labor force participation at large (Berniell et al., 2022). In Ghana, the mothering load and

burden of work caused stress, and only support from the extended families and relatives

within the community came to the rescue (Akuoko et al., 2021). In Nigeria and South Africa,

“housework,”including tasks like cooking, laundry, cleaning, paying bills, automobile

repairs, driving, shopping and others, saw clear divisions of male and female roles that

widened during the pandemic (Obioma et al., 2022). These studies indicate that childcare

responsibilities fell on mothers’shoulders as fathers took to on-site work and effectively spent

less time with their children. In addition to childcare, domestic chore responsibilities also saw

a greater divide during the pandemic (Obioma et al., 2022;Akuoko et al., 2021;Berniell

et al., 2022).

Recommendations have also been proposed by previous studies like Kapoor et al. (2021),

stating provisions of flexible working hours and virtual stress management programs to be

provided by organizations for the psychological well-being of working mothers. However,

organizational interventions like flexible working hours are often misused to have employees

work even at odd hours. Stress management programs are also seen as work added to the

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