The gendered effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on work-family conflicts: Evidence from a Portuguese research-intensive public university

The COVID-19 pandemic is having dramatic consequences for people’s work conditions and work-life balance, and academics are no exception. With university´s campuses, school and daycare closures, as a result of COVID-19 lockdown, academic staff were required to manage their fieldwork research and laboratories, transfer courses to online platforms, and continue academic productivity, while simultaneously caring for and home-schooling their children. Women academics, especially those who are mothers, are likely to find themselves at the heart of the conflicting domestic and professional pressures, as long-standing evidence demonstrates that women perform significantly more domestic labour and care work than men, including in academic households. This paper aims to explore the impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on work-family/life balance challenges and conflicts of academics, draw on the results of a survey of 218 faculty from one of the major Portuguese public universities and one of the oldest in the world. Data were processed and analysed using the SPSS statistical software and different statistical analyses of the material were conducted. The results of the survey suggest that gender inequalities are shaping COVID’s impact on work-life balance challenges, making it particularly more difficult to academic women, particularly younger mothers in non-tenure-track positions, to reconcile the competing time demands of professional work and the increased domestic and family chores during the lockdown. Our findings show that not only the pandemic disproportionately affected the housework and care routines of women academics (especially younger mothers), but also the personal routines of women, who most reported a reduction of leisure time during the lockdown, as compared to their male counterparts. The disproportionate household and care burden placed by COVID restriction on female respondents has shown to have effects on work-family negotiations and conflicts, posing differentiated challenges to women, especially those with children up to 12. Regression analyses show that gender and parental status, interacting to a greater or lesser extent, are prominent predictors of most perceived negative spillover between domestic/family duties and work demands. Moreover, statistical results indicate that women academics, independently of the family status, are particularly affected by the dilution of temporal boundaries between paid work and family during the “stay home order”, which is reflected, for instance, on women respondents’ greater need to work at unusual hours and a higher sense of "never-ending working from home shift" as compared to men. Finally, substantial gender differences are observed regarding the respondents’ perceived ability to devote time to academic work: female academics and people with young children in the household are who most emphasize the influence of COVID-19 on the amount of time dedicated to professional work.