Conciliación trabajo-familia con y sin niños y niñas, durante el confinamiento por COVID-19 en México

Abstract

As a health policy for COVID-19, the confinement's implementation transformed the home beyond family life into the workplace and school. In this context, we analyze the work-family reconciliation (WFR) based on gender and whether having children. The study has a mixed approach. We applied 578 online questionnaires and 50 interviews with Mexican workers. We found that amid the accelerated shift to virtual work, professional and private roles have blurred. Online work broke into personal life resulting in the entanglement of duties, grueling work hours, unfavorable institutional policies to reconcile work-family, and hostility from co-workers, all of which triggered stress and frustration in workers, mainly in fathers/mothers. For women with children, the risk of unemployment increased three times. Thus, this confinement triggered, without planning it, a social experiment that allows us to see some of the effects of the work-family conflict and the difficulty WFR implies in the face of the abrupt and massive implementation of policies according to the neoliberal model.