'We are bound to work from home' gender and digitalisation of work

There is growing research on digitalisation of work, although gender remains undertheorised owing to an overwhelming focus on male-dominated gig and platform work, largely in the Global North. This chapter turns to the practice of work-from-home as a feature of incremental digitalisation of work to understand how digitalisation of work is gendered. It does so by drawing upon research with young women professionals with experience of work-from-home in urban India. It engages with their discussions of spatial constraints, both in terms of setting up workspaces at home, as well as inability to leave the house and engage with ‘outside’, and importantly, non-domestic cultures. The research also shows that women asserted their worker subjectivities by wider embrace of digital leisure and consumption, crafting themselves as the digital generation. The chapter moves beyond commonplace discussions in the field – work-life balance, gender digital divide, importance of digital inclusion – to draw attention to work subjectivities as a site where workers’ appraisals of and engagements with broader discourses of digitalisation, globalisation, development, and modernity become visible. In that, the chapter proposes a global-local-personal approach to the analysis of gender and digitalisation of work.