Like many European countries, the Government of Kazakhstan put measures of social isolation, including quarantine, lockdown and school closure, at the beginning of the pandemic to slow down the contagion, protect the healthcare system from collapse and save lives. These measures, while necessary, disrupted schooling across the country for a substantial amount of time. Specifically, all schools shifted to online mode from 6th April 2020 until the end of the school year in June 2020. Most children were also schooled online or in the blended mode for most of the second pandemic year. The advent of the Omicron variant has led to partial school closure in the country due to increasing rates of transmission across many cities and regions.

Globally, gender has emerged as an essential analytical category in estimating the unequal social, health, economic and educational impacts of COVID-19 (Cohen & van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021; Durrani et al., 2021; Jellen & Ohlbrecht, 2020). Even before the pandemic, inequities of time spent on unpaid care work and domestic chores existed at the expense of women (Connelly & Kongar, 2017; Lokot & Bhatia, 2020). Extensive school closures have increased the amount of time spent in reproductive labour for both men and women in Asia and the Pacific (Cohen & van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021; UN Women & Women Count, 2020), the UK (Adams-Prassl et al., 2020; Sevilla & Smith, 2020), Spain (Farré et al., 2020) and the US (Alon et al., 2020; Collins et al., 2020;  Ma et al., 2020). However, this situation has had a greater impact on women. Furthermore, working mothers’ work-life balance and psychological well-being are particularly impacted by the additional and disproportionate care burden (Clark et al., 2021). Single mothers, those with low-income and precarious livelihoods and parents of children under 18 are also disproportionately affected (Hamel et al., 2020).

Likewise, a substantial proportion (40%) of Kazakhstani women saw an increase in the time spent on care/domestic labour during the pandemic (UN Women and UNFPA, 2020). Given this global and national background, it is of contemporary relevance and significance to explore the impact of gender on homeschooling in Kazakhstan. This paper explores the ways Kazakhstani parents experienced homeschooling during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the paper investigates: the gender division of labour involved in homeschooling; the gendered impact of homeschooling on work-life balance and family relationships; and the ways gender intersects with other social identities in producing differentiated outcomes for parents.

Understanding the theoretical underpinnings of gender and becoming gendered is vital to apprehend the gendered differentiated impact of the pandemic. Becoming gendered is a cultural and communal process in which one learns and constructs ideas about masculinities—culturally approved ways of being a man—and femininities—culturally approved ways of being a woman (Peachter, 2007). Femininities and masculinities are performed continuously and are regulated and sanctioned by social institutions such as the family, the school and the workplace, hiding the socially constructed nature of gender and giving gender an allusion of ‘naturalisation’ and ‘essentialisation’ (Butler, 2006). Gender norms are temporal and contextual and intersect with other social identities since our multiple social identities profoundly shape our’ beliefs about and experience of gender’ (Shields, 2008, p. 301). The seminal work of Boserup (1970) identified the centrality of the gendered division of labour to gendered outcomes of development processes. Feminist analyses since then have called for incorporating the gender division of labour and unpaid domestic work into development policies (Connelly & Kongar, 2017). Such analyses are particularly significant during education in emergencies and ongoing crises so that policies are gender-responsive (UNESCO, 2006).

The paper uses a mixed-methods sequential exploratory design recommended for use in situations where little knowledge exists on the topic, and a contextually relevant instrument is non-existent (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). Ethical clearance for the study was obtained in two stages. Stage 1 comprised a small-scale qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 30 parents across three regions in the country. Of these, ten interviews each were conducted in the capital city, Nur-Sultan located in the north, Almaty region located in the southeast and Shymkent located in south-central Kazakhstan. The interviews were held between December 2020 and February 2021. Most of the interviews were conducted via Zoom in Kazakh and Russian, and all interviews were transcribed and translated into English for analysis in NVivo. The qualitative data analysis led to the development of a contextually relevant survey that captured information on a range of topics, including the division of labour during homeschooling. All but one participating parents were women. During Stage 2, an online survey was administered between June – September 2021. After data cleansing, the quantitative dataset contains responses of 22, 317 parents representing all sixteen regions of Kazakhstan. An overwhelming majority (96.4%) of survey respondents were also women. The under-representation of fathers in the study indicates homeschooling is a gendered phenomenon that falls on mothers. At the time of writing this abstract, descriptive analysis of the data has been completed in SPSS, which will be followed up by bivariate and multivariate analysis to understand the ways other social identities (ethnicity, age, family type, number of children, income, employment status and location, i.e., rural vs. urban) intersect with gender in producing differentiated outcomes for parents. Findings from both qualitative and quantitative data sets will be taken collectively to answer the research questions.

The interviews confirmed that mothers spent a significant time helping or supervising their children, particularly if they had a primary-grade child, while children towards the upper end of secondary grades mainly worked independently. Similarly, survey respondents indicated that a greater proportion of mothers (55.2%) than fathers (11.00%) helped or supervised their child/children during online schooling, while 21.2% of parents specified their child/children learnt independently. Additionally, 13.3% identified that their children were helped/ supervised by an elder sibling (13.3%) or another caregiver (e.g., grandmother, 5.1%). On average, parents with children in primary grades spent more time helping/ supervising their child/children (between 2-3 hours) a day than parents with a child in upper secondary grades (around an hour). The qualitative data painted a vivid picture of mothers’ struggles during homeschooling. They had to learn subject matter they did not know; monitor the child; manage arguments among children, especially over space and laptops/smartphones; communicate more frequently with teachers and were often expected to explain why their child was off track. Mothers with several school-aged children were inundated with managing multiple chat groups. Besides, working mothers had to manage all of this whilst meeting professional obligations. The time spent on homeschooling needs to be considered in the division of domestic labour. Both data sets revealed that mothers were predominantly responsible for childcare, household chores, cooking, supporting children with home learning, taking children to schools when schools were back in session, and shopping for food/essentials. Gender is also associated with tensions in relationships resulting from remote learning. Since mothers are homeschooling, they are responsible for disciplining children and pushing their academic performance, thus straining children’s relationships with their mothers, who are also now their teachers. The paper offers gender-responsive policy strategies for post-COVID support to education systems, mothers and families.

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