Abstract Promoted as transformative of personal lifestyles and broader socio-environmental strategies, smart homes often deliver material change without disrupting entrenched social norms. As such, they tend to reinforce existing social structures instead of challenging or reforming them. This article presents the first cross-disciplinary critical review of 92 smart home publications to evaluate the extent to which gender has been meaningfully addressed in this field. Using qualitative content analysis across disciplines, four dominant analytical strands were identified, and only 19% of studies adopt constructivist or intersectional approaches to gender, while the majority treat it as a binary demographic variable. Only 12% of studies engage in discourse analysis to interrogate how smart home narratives reproduce heteronormative assumptions and gendered divisions of labour. Technical and quantitatively oriented research largely ignores gendered dynamics, reinforcing assumptions of neutrality in smart technology design. Authors argue that this lack of engagement with gender—as well as with intersecting categories such as race, class, and disability—limits the field’s conceptual richness and social responsiveness. The findings underscore the urgent need for more inclusive and reflective methodological frameworks and offer practical guidance for integrating gender-sensitive approaches into future smart home research, design, and policy.
Hamarowski et al. (Fri,) studied this question.