The bad news is it takes some getting used to. The good news is that if you feel infuriated by your spouse, in despair at what to do with the kids or overwhelmed by trying to manage everything, you are not uniquely hopeless and nor is your family unusually dysfunctional.

When my husband and I started down the homeworking path, we found it much less idyllic than expected. In fact we very nearly split up – even without the added stress of coronavirus worries. But we worked it out. Today, it would take a lot to coax me back to an office job.

Thanks to coronavirus, millions of office-based workers suddenly find themselves in something like our situation. Like everyone else, I hope the pandemic passes soon and we can all go back to normal. But meanwhile, as the nation locks down, here are some things I learned about having home, family and workplace all in the same place without going mad or getting divorced.

Get dressed

If you work outside the home, having to go out in public is motivation to stay presentable. Working from home, the temptation is to treat every day like a weekend, bumbling about in your pyjamas with birds-nest hair. But stay at home mums learn quickly that being clean and presentable – even when you don’t have to – is key to feeling like a normal human being, as well as to that crucial sense of being (at least some of the time) one step ahead of your children.

The same goes for home workers – which is now, suddenly, a lot of us. These are strange and upsetting times. You have just lost most of the structures that define ‘normal’, for an indefinite duration. If you let personal hygiene go as well, you will feel like you are losing the plot. Obviously you don’t have to put on a suit, but you will feel much more yourself if you have a shower and put daytime clothes on first thing. (It also makes short notice videoconferences less stressful.)

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Have a routine

Usually, people have school or office hours to give shape to their daily lives. When I started my stint as a stay at home mum, I tried doing away with all such structures. Egged on by the nocturnal food needs of a new baby, I found myself keeping increasingly strange hours. But once the fog lifted, I realised that even with no one forcing me into a daily routine, I still needed to give my days some shape.

Your office may have shut down, but your body clock has not, and nor have your kids’ body clocks. Get up and go to bed at the same time every day, and stick to regular meals. Life is weird enough right now without giving yourself jetlag as well.

Randomness also wastes energy. You are now in charge of your own daily structure, and your kids’ structure too. If you have to negotiate everything from first principles you will have no bandwidth left for anything more interesting than nagging. The more you can turn into habit, the easier it is to get mundane stuff done and still have energy for more interesting activities.

Everyone cleans and tidies every day

Most families with two working parents get by in domestic terms with a weekend effort or a weekly cleaner. I am here to tell you that is no longer enough. The difference in mess, dust and general grottiness between a family out at work or school every day, and at home all the time, is more than a weekly blitz can cope with.

This matters, because your home is now your workspace and the more of a midden it is the more miserable you will feel. The good news, though, is that you now have time. Hardly anyone really does more than five hours of productive work a day, even if they are at their desk for double that time. You no longer have to look busy in front of colleagues, so between that and your now very short commute, you just gained maybe four hours of daily free time.

When work hits a lull, use some of that time to clean the house. In my experience half an hour a day is enough to keep things under control.Getting up, moving about and watching squalor turn into order is also useful thinking time after a burst of work, not to mention better for your mental health than obsessively refreshing the coronapanic on Twitter.

Make a conscious effort to set cleaning time aside, set a timer, get the kids involved. If you find yourself just moving piles of stuff from one surface to another and prodding around with a duster without ever seeing an improvement, The Organised Mum has a brilliant system that will help you get a grip.

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Split the shift

I take my hat off to all the single parents figuring out how to navigate home working with kids present. If you live with a partner, though, I recommend you split the shift. In our household, I like waking and working early, while my husband is more productive later in the day. So while schools and childminders are closed he is the childcaring parent until noon (I am usually at my desk by 5am) and I’m on duty after that.

If you do split the shift, try to be clear who is in charge of the kids and step back if it isn’t you. Don’t micromanage if the other parent is in charge. Don’t be Fun Uncle, either: if you wander in from your desk to make a coffee and end up whisking the kids off to play while your in-charge-of-the-kids-right-now spouse sits about like a lemon, they will not see it as ‘helping’. At least, don’t complain if they then leave you with the baby and go off to answer emails.

Dial back expectations

Families that only have evenings and weekends together are more likely to assume ‘quality time’ as the standard. But when you are together 24/7 you cannot keep that up. Especially resist the temptation to be constantly hands-on with the kids. Schools are sending crazy amounts of work out for distance learning but remember they are panicking too. A bit of structure is good (one friend, several weeks into lockdown in Italy, says her kids’ music practice is going great guns) but at least for young children, that structure can be mostly practical tasks and pottering about. A few weeks of Lego and helping with housework interspersed with the odd worksheet will do no harm.

As my husband and I discovered when we moved to home-working, being around your spouse 24/7 also means dialling back the intensity of your relationship and respecting each other’s headspace. If you spring a major worry or decision on your spouse who is deep in work thoughts and just came in for a snack, you are more likely to get a knock-back than the answer you need. A quick check that your other half has enough bandwidth for a chat will spare you many stupid arguments.

We make a point of eating together as a family, and making time for conversation after our daughter is asleep, but otherwise mostly act as if we are both out at work in different locations. We are lucky to have a home office each, but even if your space does not allow that, work in different rooms. If sharing a room is unavoidable, make headphones socially acceptable.

If space is very tight, former submariner Jon Bailey (who ought to know about coping with confinement) recommends timesharing the sitting room so everyone gets an hour or so alone to do as they please.

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Be patient with each other

It takes practice and negotiation to manage sharing space, schedules, chores and childcare alongside work all under a single roof. Be patient with each other.

If you are usually the main caregiver and domestic organiser, you may feel invaded by all these extra bodies in your well-organised space. Try not to radiate resentment or micromanage everyone’s schedules, no matter how tempting it is. (Seriously – this nearly cost me my marriage.)

Conversely, if your spouse is usually in charge of the household, remember he or she has already put thought and effort into systems that make it run smoothly. Don’t insult him or her with your blindness to that achievement. Find out how things work and what tasks you can take on within the existing system. You may think you have a brilliant idea to improve the system, but resist the temptation to hold forth until you understand how everything fits together. Otherwise you will come across like a graduate first-jobber trying to reorganise the entire company and getting sulky when rebuffed.

Make time for meals and exercise

Making time for movement is not a waste of your working day, it is vital to your sanity. Gardening, cleaning, yoga, weights or aerobics  – there are plenty of forms of physical activity compatible with the lockdown measures even if you are self-isolating. Workout apps, YouTube and the internet are your friend for low-equipment exercise ideas suitable for all ages. Likewise, cook proper food and eat together as a family as much as possible – you can go back to ignoring each other companionably in between.

Baking your own bread is easy

On a cheerier final note, baking bread is easy and makes the house smell amazing. If your poncy bakery has closed with the lockdown, this is your opportunity to fine-tune your sourdough technique and irritate everyone on social media with crumb shots. I recommend Ken Forkish’s fantastically nerdy Flour Water Salt Yeast as a foolproof primer for delicious breadmaking. Be warned though: bread is the gateway drug for a weirdly addictive (really!) world of yeast-based hobbies, and you will be brewing your own booze before you know it

What the pay gaps expose, more than anything else, is the lack of women in senior positions in most organisations. Some will argue progress is being made, citing, for example, the increasing proportion of women on the boards of the UK’s 100 biggest companies. But that hasn’t happened unaided, and the numbers largely reflect the appointment of more female non-executive directors, who often sit on multiple boards. The proportion of senior women executive directors in boardrooms has barely changed in a decade, and is still below 10%. And the proportion of senior business posts more generally held by women in the UK actually fell 2% last year, to 19%.

It is not that women are less ambitious. But their social conditioning plays a part. A recent study  looked at the attitudes of women in China who grew up under the communist regime where gender equality was emphasised, compared to the attitudes of those who grew up during the post-1978 reform era or in capitalist Taiwan.[1. Alison Booth, Elliott Fan, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, ‘Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Evidence from China’, Royal Economic Society conference, March 2018] It found that those exposed to strong messages of gender equality, even for a short period, were more competitively inclined: culture and institutions matter in women’s willingness to compete.

Where capitalism fails to provide an environment conducive to equality, communism seems, at least on the surface, to get much closer. This is not to defend communism as a system, women in communist states such as the former Soviet Union who struggled to acquire the basic necessities for their family did not enjoy a better life. But what they did enjoy was an equal expectation that they would work, underpinned by free childcare, education and training. According to a New York Times investigation, male chauvinism in the Warsaw Pact countries was seen as a remnant of the pre-socialist era. And although wage disparities were still prevalent, women were represented in bigger numbers in senior positions.

Why are senior women role models lacking under capitalism?

The Anglo-Saxon capitalist system as practised in the UK and the US tends to favour aiming for short-term returns, driven by increased quarterly reporting and continued analysts’ scrutiny. Institutional investors themselves often contribute to the excessively short-term focus by corporate boards.[2. Davis, Lukpmnik and Pitt-Warson, What They Do With Your Money, Yale, 2016] Bringing about the cultural change required to make women want to stay at work and fully use their skills doesn’t fit with that model – it requires dedication and long-term investment in childcare, training, and incentives to encourage women to go back to work (for example using “returnship” programmes). It also means fundamentally altering the way an organisation works, including the way men structure their days and their attitudes towards women co-workers.

This is an obvious market failure where talents are lost to the economy because the system doesn’t respond in an efficient way. Skills are a major contributor to productivity – in fact the most important one. And it is productivity that determines an economy’s long term sustainable growth rate and prosperity. But as with Corporate Social Responsibility, or caring for the environment, we know that even though acting in accordance with those principles makes good long-term business sense, firms won’t do it unless pushed – just look at how long it has taken to increase the proportion of women on boards despite the evidence that diverse teams perform better.

Some people will explain away this gender disparity by blaming women’s reproductive tendencies. But that is only half the story – there is ample documented evidence of both conscious and unconscious bias in organisations which discriminates against women irrespective of whether they are mothers. One 2014 survey for example found that  40% of managers were wary of hiring “women of childbearing age”. And according to a 2018 YouGov survey one third of senior managers think it is acceptable to ask women in interviews whether they intend to have children. Indeed a quarter of women have been asked, at work, whether they plan to have children.

Business culture and practice is the problem, not women having children

That is not to ignore the fact that many women do choose to take time out of the workplace to have children. But the cost to them is significant. A 2016 report by the Institute for Fiscal studies showed that when women enter the labour force the gap in mean average hourly pay between men and women is virtually non-existent. By the time women are in their late 20s, the gap has risen to 10%, and it continues rising steadily thereafter. For mothers the gap carries on increasing to 33% by year 12 after the birth of their first child. Those mothers miss out on workplace skills and experience, and therefore promotion prospects, and that is especially the case if they return to work part time. The economy loses out permanently as the system does not seem to either value them or want to invest in them on their return ­– which is a double loss given firms have already invested in the training and development of those women.

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Childcare provision is key to tackling this female brain-drain. Evidence from Germany suggests that where regional or local government provided childcare is available it allows women to both earn higher salaries and progress up the career path more easily.[3. Vidhi Chhaochharia, ‘Childcare policies boost women’s wages and careers: Evidence from Germany’, Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex, March 2018] A study of mothers in Italy showed that those who decided to shorten their maternity leave taking advantage of state-subsidised childcare were much less likely to leave the labour market and thus be lost to the economy.[4. Enrica Maria Martino, ‘The labour cost of motherhood: Evidence from Italy’, Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex in Brighton in March 2018] And of course childcare can pay its way over the long term. Women who work earn more, receive less in benefits, consume more, and pay more direct and indirect taxes than would otherwise be the case.

Women will still want to have the flexibility to look after children – but so would many men if the long-hours culture which tends to put women off, yet still seems to be the route to promotion, was discouraged. Macho enclaves that still frown upon flexible working should have no place in the modern workplace.

As Cambridge University Professor Mary Beard has pointed out, mechanisms that sever women from the centres of power are deeply embedded in Western culture.[5. Mary Beard, ‘Women & Power’, Profile Books, 2017] Every meaningful change in the UK has required state intervention – the Equal Pay Act, the Equality Act, Pay Audits, etc. As long as the system prevents women from achieving economic equality, gender power imbalances will remain. #MeToo and similar movements are not going to fix that.