Transformation of Home into Workspace for Women during Covid-19 Pandemic: Expression of Work and Non-Work Life Balance on Social Media

Abstract

With the pandemic remote working has become the norm around the world, especially for office workers. In cases where the necessary equipment and infrastructure cannot be provided, it is inevitable for the employees to be faced with a challenging home-office environment where their needs such as home and child care are mixed together while they carry out their work at home (Vu, 2020). Practices related to the position of women in the business world, who made positive progress until the beginning of the global epidemic; as a result of the fact that women and mothers are particularly affected by ‘work-at-home’ during the pandemic, decades of gains related to women’s participation in the workforce may be disrupted. However, it is observed that working women, who face many difficulties in work-life balance, start to think about taking a step back in their careers or leaving their jobs (Baser, 2020). The main questions of this study are how and to what extent female employees adapt to the “home” as both living and working space, how they experience the balance of work and non-work life, and how this situation affects their well-being and well-being during the pandemic period. Our work deals with working from home in the context of the relationship between the individual and the environment, in order to contribute both theoretically and practically to a multidisciplinary subject that includes architecture, psychology and medicine. In this, the posts about working from home on a social networking platform (Instagram™) with a netnographic (Serafinelli, 2017) approach between March’2020 and October’2021 were evaluated with content analysis. Instagram content, with its data repository function that records people’s digital footprints, is an official source used in many researches today (Serafinelli, 2017). Following the first phase of the research, which was conducted on indicators related to time interval, gender, positive-negative emotion-concept sharing, work and non-work life balance, workplace and institutionalism, the evaluations were made on shared photographs. Content analysis produced seven themes mainly related to children and workspace arrangements. And the absence of males in the reflected experiences of women is critical. © Peter Lang GmbH.