Toronto’s Metro News recently interviewed both Professor Irene Boeckmann and Professor Melissa Milkie in a story about working at home. The story starts with a reference to a recent viral video of a dad being interrupted by his children during a BBC skype interview and goes on to discuss working from home. The full story is available here . Below is an excerpt:
Work-from-home parents more likely to be women: Experts
Experience of dad who went viral during BBC interview common for women who work from home while caring for young children.
If you spent more than a nanosecond online over the weekend, you probably saw the video of a toddler bombing her dad as he’s giving a live Skype interview with BBC News.
You also probably laughed out loud as the little girl bounced into her father’s home office, followed by a younger sibling in a walker, then their panicked mother who drags the kids out of the room. But for those working from home, that comedy of errors is all too familiar.
With many workplaces offering little flexibility as to when and where parents can work, and daycare costs continuing to rise, more parents are choosing to leave their careers to carve out new paths as freelancers or entrepreneurs.
More often than not it’s women, not men, who are entering this new fray: not quite stay-at-home moms, not quite working moms, but some sort of hybrid version of both.
Irene Boekmann, assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto, says children are a big driving factor forcing women from work, and that this doesn’t tend to be the case for fathers.
“There is definitely an interesting gendered story here,” she said, pointing out that mothers with younger children are more likely to work from home than other women. “Research shows that children increase Canadian women’s (but not men’s) likelihood of self-employment.”