The current study examined the right to a professional workspace and separation between private and public within the home as an arena of gendered negotiation and struggle between spouses working from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Using a qualitative, inductive approach based on grounded theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with fifteen professional couples in Israel about their experiences with working from home and the division of labor and space between spouses. Our analysis revealed three key issues related to these experiences: the division of physical workspace between the spouses, the division of work time (compared to home time), and bodily-spatial aspects of the infiltration of workspace into home through the Zoom camera. The patterns described here suggest that the gendered power relations between spouses working from home are reproduced through an unequal negotiation of space and time in the home, so that in practice, men’s work was prioritized in spatio-temporal terms, whereas women’s workspace and time was more fragmented and dispersed throughout the home and day. These findings illuminate women’s right to workspace in the home as an issue of gender equality that has been amplified by the current global pandemic, and how gendered divisions of space and time serve to reproduce the gender order.

目前的研究调查了在 COVID-19 危机期间在家工作的配偶之间进行性别谈判和斗争的场所，即拥有专业工作空间的权利以及家庭内私人和公共部门之间的分离。使用基于扎根理论的定性归纳方法，我们对以色列的 15 对专业夫妇进行了深入访谈，了解他们在家工作的经历以及配偶之间的分工和空间。我们的分析揭示了与这些经历相关的三个关键问题：配偶之间物理工作空间的划分、工作时间的划分（与家庭时间相比）以及通过变焦相机将工作空间渗透到家中的身体空间方面。这里描述的模式表明，在家工作的配偶之间的性别权力关系是通过对家庭空间和时间的不平等协商来复制的，因此在实践中，男性的工作在时空方面被优先考虑，而女性的工作空间和时间则被优先考虑。在整个家庭和日常生活中更加分散和分散。这些发现阐明了女性在家中工作的权利是一个已被当前全球流行病放大的性别平等问题，以及空间和时间的性别划分如何服务于再现性别秩序。