Spatial and Temporal Segmenting of Urban workplaces: The gendering of multi-locational working

Existing urban research has focused on gender differences in commuting patterns to and from homes but paid little attention to the gendered diversity in the spatial-temporal patterns of work. The increase in remote working and information and communications technology (ICT) work have been emphasised, but at the cost of exploring the full range of workplaces and multi-locational working observed in urban areas. This paper develops a new classificatory system to analyse the spatial-temporal patterns of work in European cities using the 2015 6th European Working Conditions Survey. We identify 12 distinct spatial-temporal work patterns of full-time workers and investigate gender differences across these patterns against the backdrop of occupation, industrial sector, employment status, household composition, and ICT use. Findings show that women are far more likely to be restricted to only working at the employer/business premises while men have more varied and complex spatial-temporal patterns of work. Multi-locational working rather than working at one workplace is a largely male phenomenon. Working exclusively at home is still a rarity, but combinations with employer premises and other workplaces are more common. We conclude that workplace research has been blinkered by narrow concerns of advances in mobile technologies and has been blind to the pervasive effects of spatial-temporal divisions of the working lives of men and women. The methodological and theoretical implications of this new perspective on workplaces for urban development and research are discussed.