Abstract
Working from home was meant to give employees more control over their day. For many it has done the opposite, because the office has moved into the house and the housework is still waiting there. This non-doctrinal, empirical paper asks whether working from home has produced a “double shift” for working women, and how far Indian law recognises or addresses it. Data were collected through an online questionnaire of 22 closed questions, and 112 responses from working women (n = 63) and men (n = 49) were analysed after removing 64 suspected duplicate submissions. Most respondents worked in the IT sector (61.6%). Women were far more likely than men to spend three hours or more on housework in a day (53.2% against 18.4%, p < 0.001) and to manage office work and housework together every day (47.6% against 20.4%, p = 0.003). Married respondents carried more housework than unmarried ones (53.4% against 20.8%). Only 18.8% could always log out on time, 87.3% received work calls or messages after office hours, and 82.7% reported stress, pain or lost sleep at least sometimes. Awareness of the Supreme Court’s view that homemaking is valuable work was low (31.2%), although 91.9% agreed that housework is real work and 86.4% wanted a law against after-hours contact. The paper reads these findings against the Time Use Survey data, the Constitution, the Labour Codes, international standards and recent Supreme Court decisions, and ends with practical suggestions for law and workplace policy.
Keywords: Work from Home; Unpaid Domestic Work; Double Shift; Work-Life Balance; Right to Disconnect; Gender and Law; Non-Doctrinal Research; India
- Introduction
When the lockdown of 2020 sent millions of Indian employees home, the first reaction was relief. There would be no commute, no rigid timetable, and more time with the family. A few weeks in, many people noticed something less comfortable. The laptop sat on the dining table, the pressure cooker whistled in the next room, and a child or an elderly parent needed attention in the middle of a meeting. For a large number of working women this was not new. It was simply the old arrangement, now happening in one room instead of two.
The sociologist Arlie Hochschild gave this arrangement a name. In her study of American working couples she described the unpaid work waiting at home after a paid day as “the second shift”, and she found that it fell mostly on women. Work from home changes the picture in one important way. The two shifts no longer follow each other. They overlap. A person can answer an email with one hand and stir a pan with the other, and that overlap is what this paper calls the double shift.
The Indian numbers on unpaid work were already lopsided before the pandemic. The National Statistics Office’s Time Use Survey of 2019 recorded that women who took part in unpaid domestic services spent about 299 minutes a day on them, against 97 minutes for men who took part. The 2024 round shows almost the same picture, at 289 minutes for women and 88 minutes for men. These are averages per participant, so they describe how long the job takes once a person does it. They do not say how many people do it. Still, a gap of nearly three to one after five years suggests that the pandemic did not shift the balance.
1.1 Background of the Study
Two things make the Indian position unusual. First, Indian law has no general statute on working from home. The Special Economic Zones Rules were amended in July 2022 to allow work from home for employees of units in those zones, and the Maternity Benefit Act permits an employer and a woman who has returned from maternity leave to agree on home-based work if the nature of the job allows it. Beyond these two, the employee depends on the employer’s own policy. The four Labour Codes came into force on 21 November 2025, but they do not set out a general right to work from home or a right to switch off.
Second, the courts have been moving towards a fuller view of what housework is worth. The Supreme Court has used the value of a homemaker’s labour to fix compensation in motor accident claims, and in June 2026, in Shishu Pal @ Shish Ram v Surjeet, it was reported to have described homemakers as contributors to the nation’s economy. Yet recognition in a compensation case is a long way from a rule that protects a working woman’s evening. The study sits in that gap between what the law says about housework and what working households actually go through.