September 30, 2026

How did the COVID-19 pandemic reshape everyday life, labour, and emotional well-being within Singaporean households? In their recent article ‘Gendered Dynamics and Emotional Well-Being in the ‘Aftermath’ of the Pandemic’ (Asian Journal of Social Science, 2025), Professor Vineeta Sinha, Associate Professor Narayanan Ganapathy, Associate Professor Daniel P. S. Goh, and Pooja Nair (all NUS Sociology and Anthropology) examine how gendered responsibilities intensified during lockdowns, and how women internalised and normalised the emotional toll of this imbalance.

Drawing on qualitative ethnographic data from 28 Singaporean middle-class households and interviews with 24 women and four men, the study adopts a sociological and lived experience lens to explore how wives and mothers navigated the disruptions of work-from-home and home-based learning arrangements. The findings reveal that despite increased domestic confinement, the gendered division of labour persisted, with women performing a “triple shift” — combining paid employment, domestic duties, and emotional caretaking.

Through rich narratives collected via digital ethnography on WhatsApp and Zoom, the research illustrates how women often rationalised unequal workloads and emotional exhaustion as resilience, prioritising family harmony over self-care. This normalisation of stress underscores how cultural expectations around femininity and care shaped mental well-being during crisis.

The authors show that women’s mental health during the pandemic was not just a personal issue, but deeply shaped by social factors — especially long-standing gender roles and the extra unpaid work many women took on at home. They call for structural and policy reforms that recognise the gendered cost of the pandemic — one that continues to affect women’s emotional lives long after the virus has faded.

Read the article here.