Another rape incident — this time of a minor in a public park — has shocked the capital. Lady Shri Ram College, located barely a kilometre from Aastha Kunj Park, decided to shift its classes online in response to students’ protests around their safety in public spaces. Once again, the solution to a woman’s concerns was to lock her indoors — a convenient choice that families and educational institutions have made for decades.

During my college years, I remember the Pinjra Tod movement and the night walks that sought to reclaim the streets and challenge the idea that women’s safety could be secured by restricting women’s mobility. Today, however, a new lockdown has been enabled by technology. The digital world that once helped women step out of the home is increasingly becoming the reason we can ask them to stay in it. While I was growing up in the early 2000s, the BPO sector was exploding. An increasing number of women were entering the workforce. Night shifts became commonplace. There was an undeniable allure to these technology-enabled jobs: For many young women, they offered a first taste of financial independence, mobility, and a life beyond the boundaries of the home. Young women were beginning to occupy public spaces — and the public imagination— as equal citizens.

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But now, institutions are increasingly able to shake off their responsibilities and move online rather than address structural issues. The Covid19 pandemic made us comfortable with this. What began as an emergency response has now become an easy solution to a range of problems. When a neighbourhood is unsafe, shift classes online. When pollution becomes unbearable, move schools online. When there is a heatwave or a disruption to public life, move work online.

While digital work and online education can be immensely helpful, the problem is what happens when they become the default response to problems. Instead of asking how women can continue to safely occupy public spaces, we make it easier for them not to occupy them at all. Moving work and education online also assumes that the home is automatically a safe and productive space. For many women, domestic spaces are themselves sites of violence, surveillance and unequal power. And when a woman works or studies from home, she is rarely only working or studying. The boundaries between paid work and unpaid domestic labour become blurred. A university, meanwhile, is not simply a place where a student receives information for a few hours. It is a social and intellectual space where young men and women learn independence and negotiate their position as citizens.

Post-pandemic, there is also an increasing expectation that women can simply “work from home (WFH)”. Since becoming a mother a few months ago, I am increasingly asked: Why do you need to travel to a university? Why can’t you just teach online, prioritise your child?

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I see an increasing number of families making similar calculations. They prefer daughters to study close to home, not leave the city. Remote work becomes attractive because a woman can earn while also “managing” the household. In a recent “rishta meeting”, my cousin was told that she can work from home “if she likes”, that there is “no need” to go to an office because “aajkal ka mahaul kharab hai (the situation isn’t good)”.

WFH sounds like flexibility. But we should be careful that technology does not become a more sophisticated way of putting women back in a way that looks less like confinement because the door is not visibly locked.

The writer is assistant professor, Jindal School of Design and Architecture, OP Jindal Global University