Work at home jobs take place in what is often considered family space. When employment activities take place in one's dwelling, it brings paid work into the space where duty, need, and love motivate labor. work at home jobs helps to construct gender at the household level.

Gender and its influence on family and household activities are rooted in the more general conceptions of gender within larger sociohistorical settings. The historically structured conceptions of gender within a particular cultural system (the gender order) influence the beliefs and expectations about the appropriate activities of men and women within a family or home setting (a gender regime). To understand the effects of gender on and from work at home jobs, then, one must be mindful of the intersections of culture, society, economy, and family at both the more macro-process and micro-process levels. The more micro-process level are face-to-face daily processes of negotiation and doing gender and are the lived reality of home-worker households.

Gender is a general category of social relations, like race or social class, which can have a variety of specific forms. Patriarchal gender relations are one such form. This form empowers men and subordinates women and is contested with a range of social practices and institutions. Feminist scholarship uses gender as an organizing concept involving two interrelated facets (work at home jobs): (a) the social construction of gender, especially through the emphasis of differences between men and women, and (b) the uses of these distinctions to legitimize and to perpetuate the relations (especially seen as power) between men and women. Gender relations in most forms are basically power relations. Women as a group are subordinated (legally, economically, politically, and socially) to men. Although this contention is expressed by many feminist scholars, it is also recognized that women are not just passive victims. Women are agents and creators of culture--participating in the making of history as well as their own personal biographies. In other words, their gender relationships are constructed.

Feminists argue that the dichotomy between public and private, for example, the economy or society versus the household or family, is a false one. Such dualistic thinking contributes to the canard that logically men are the actors in the public spheres and women are the actors in the private spheres. It also hides the way gender in the work at home jobs is connected to gender in the greater domains of culture and society.