Telework as a childcare policy: mitigating or increasing gender and class inequalities?

ABSTRACT

The closure of schools and preschools due to the Covid-19 pandemic constrained millions of workers with children to modify their care arrangements. In Italy and France, governments adopted different measures to support parents in handling the additional care workload, including promoting access to telework. However, we argue that equating access to telework to a childcare policy, especially during the pandemic, had significant consequences in terms of gender and class inequalities. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Italy and France, the article analyses the impact that telework as a social policy had on gender and class inequalities, stressing common trends and pointing out that caring for children while teleworking reinforces economic and gender inequalities. Moreover, the paper identifies strategies implemented by parents to cope with the challenge of child-caring while teleworking, highlighting that promoting such a policy can have unequal consequences depending on parents’ social and economic capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Childcare
• COVID-19
• inequalities
• gender
• social capital
• telework

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the participants for accepting to contribute to our research. In Italy data was collected in the context of the project DigiLife, financed by the European Social Fund of the Veneto Region and implemented by the University of Padua. In France, data was collected in the context of the project COVIMOB (Crise Sanitaire et Mobilité) sponsored by the CNRS, Grand Lyon Metropole, Sytral and Index Lyon (University of Lyon Lumière 2). Data collection and analysis regarding the French context were conducted by the Transport, Urban Planning and Economics Laboratory (LAET) of the National School of State Public Works (ENTPE).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Iris Romens

Anne-Iris Romens is a postdoctoral research fellow, who holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Padua. Before entering academia, she worked for 5 years with institutions and NGOs in France, Colombia, Brazil and Italy. Her research interests include migration, care and social reproduction, labour process, industrial relations, and remote work, which she analyses from an intersectional and decolonial perspective.

Stéphanie Vincent

Stephanie Vincent is a sociologist and urban planner. She is currently an assistant professor in Planning at the University of Lyon Lumière 2 and a member of the Transport, Urban Planning and Economics Laboratory (LAET). Her research studies concern city and mobility, with a specific focus on ‘ordinary innovation’ and the emergence of new mobility behaviours.

Paula C. Santos Menezes

Paula Santos Menezes holds a PhD in sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a master's in Urban Studies from the University of Lyon Lumière 2 (Institut d’Urbanisme de Lyon). She is currently working as a lecturer and a researcher at the Institut de la Communication (ICOM) of the University of Lyon Lumière 2. Her current research focuses on new technologies and algorithms, particularly on the impact of the platformization of society in the fields of labour and education.