Women empowering women? Challenges and opportunities of new female-oriented workplaces in the post-pandemic era

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly changed the ways in which we live and work. While the aftermath of this ongoing situation has afected the work-life balance of workers in general, it seems that women are more vulnerable to the immediate negative efects of this pandemic. The issue of changing work-family balance had already caught the attention of scholars before the pandemic. In this respect, studies have discussed the blurring of work-life boundaries, mainly due to factors such as longer working hours, part-time work, increasing number of working women and single parents, technological advances, the use of multiple ICTs at work (see, for example, Kossek & Michel, 2010; Kossek & Ozeki, 1998), and the phenomenon of fexwork,1 with both positive and negative consequences (Rice, 2017). While the digital transformation has afected individuals’ well-being and quality of life both positively and negatively, major gender gaps have emerged in some domains such as work-life balance, social interaction, and digital security (Samek Lodovici et al., 2021). Periodic lockdowns and restrictions have led to a massive shift to working from home, which, together with school closures, has put an additional burden on families. For example, the fndings of a study in Italy show that although the additional workload imposed by the current pandemic falls on women, it seems that childcare activities are shared relatively equally among couples compared to housework; achieving a work-life balance is more challenging for working women with children aged 0–5 (Del Boca et al., 2020). Though massive lockdowns are coming to an end after the frst and second waves of the pandemic, many companies across various sectors still prefer to continue remote working, or working from anywhere, even if partially. The question, however, is whether the home ofce is a preferred location for remote workers in the long term.