by Gemma Scalise and Cristina Burini
Rethinking Work after the Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a radical transformation of working life in Italy. Remote work, once a marginal practice, expanded rapidly and has since evolved into hybrid working arrangements, where employees alternate between working from home and being in the office. This new model has been particularly significant for women with children, who continue to shoulder the primary responsibility for caregiving. While hybrid work offers greater flexibility and autonomy, it also introduces new challenges and raises important questions about gender, care, and the organization of daily life.
How do mothers actually experience hybrid work in their everyday routines? Does it really reduce work–family conflict, or does it create new forms of pressure? And how might these changes shape gender inequalities in the long run?
In this blog post, we address these and other questions relying on preliminary analysis from more than 50 in-depth qualitative interviews with mothers in Milan and Naples, conducted as part of the MatGuilt project.
Our Research
Our study is based on 61 interviews, 51 of which were biographical interviews with working mothers who transitioned from on-site to remote working during the pandemic, subsequently adopting a hybrid model. These mothers belong to a target group that has generally received little attention from scholars: highly skilled women. They are financially stable and employed full-time in senior positions in the private sector. They also hold university degrees. The interviewees are aged between 30 and 50, and on average have two children aged between 0 and 14.
Ten semi-structured interviews were also conducted with key stakeholders, including human resources managers, chief executive officers and trade union representatives who were directly involved in negotiating employment contracts. This group included large companies with formalised work-life balance policies, as well as small businesses where such measures are implemented on an ad hoc basis.
Hybrid work between gains and tensions
Several interviewees emphasised the tangible gains in efficiency and well-being that hybrid working arrangements bring, portraying them as a fundamental condition for maintaining effective, satisfying, and sustainable employment.
Being able to work remotely allows me to organize my time more effectively. […] being at home and having the flexibility to manage my schedule independently provides me with significant peace of mind. I’m able to work more, perform better, and stay more focused […]. If remote work were taken away today, I honestly don’t know how I would manage (mother from Milan).
There are also narratives of overload and conflict arising from the inevitable blending of work and domestic spaces, and the overlapping of professional tasks with interactions and care for children.
You feel torn in different directions, trying to balance work and childcare. Even working from home has its challenges: you feel the need to prove yourself more, demonstrate that you’re on top of things at all times, and respond to calls and messages immediately (mother from Naples).
However, hybrid working does not eliminate the tension between professional performance and care responsibilities. The hybrid working experience appears to reinforce this aspect of self-fulfilment by giving mothers greater control over their time and presence, thus enabling them to sustain a professional role while remaining involved in family life.
Nevertheless, the interviews reveal an ongoing negotiation between work and care roles, with frequent references to feelings of guilt when prioritising one domain over the other. While hybrid arrangements enable more flexible role management, they do not resolve this tension. Instead, they reframe it as a daily balancing act, where the importance of ‘being there’ for one’s children is balanced with the desire for professional fulfilment.
Milan and Naples
A comparison between Milan and Naples illustrates how local conditions can influence the concept of hybrid working.
Milan’s welfare system operates on a quasi-market model, where public and private providers compete, but private childcare services dominate due to insufficient public provision. Milan has a high female employment rate (53.5% in Italy compared to 66.4% in Milan — Istat, 2025) but has limited and expensive public childcare services. Consequently, families who can afford it often resort to private services. Social ties are weaker: for example neighbourly relations are scarce and mothers find it difficult to meet each other, so help with work-life balance comes more from the market than from informal networks. In this context, hybrid working becomes a way of coping with care tasks.
In Naples, welfare provision relies heavily on family networks, with the third sector playing a supplementary role to compensate for limited public intervention and weak public–private integration. Naples has a female employment rate of 28%, with few public or private childcare services available. Here, family networks, particularly grandparents, provide essential support for achieving a work-life balance, partly compensating for the inadequacy of public and private services. Unlike in Milan, mutual support among mothers is also an important factor in Naples in compensating for the lack of childcare services.
There are no organizations or support systems for families […], there’s nothing. […] It would also help parents connect with one another. The neighbourhood feels so disconnected […]. Compared to other friends and acquaintances who had a stronger support system of close family members, the family network makes a significant difference, it changes your life both as a parent and within a relationship […]. Milan is truly a challenging city when it comes to building relationships with neighbours. There isn’t the spontaneity of asking neighbours for help, even if they have children the same age as yours (mother from Milan).
We are fortunate to have all our grandparents nearby. They live nearby, so when I leave in the morning, they are already here, which is essential for me. Many of my colleagues are in a similar situation. This support enables us to work peacefully, safe in the knowledge that our children are with family members rather than strangers We have built a network of mothers and help each other out. If we don’t have family members available, we try to help each other out. This gives me peace of mind when I work from home, as I know that if I am running late, I can ask the other mothers in the neighbourhood for help (mother from Naples).
Beyond Individual Strategies
The research findings show that hybrid working is often used as an alternative to inadequate public services in both cities, helping mothers cope with school closures, long summer holidays and gaps in childcare. At the company level, the interviewed trade unions support the recognition of hybrid working as a permanent tool.
However, there is a lack of attention to the issue of the erosion of boundaries between care work and professional work when hybrid modes are adopted. This lack of attention compromises the well-being of female workers, increasing their sense of guilt and frustration when they must simultaneously manage family and work responsibilities in the same physical space.
From a business perspective, organisations that adopt formalised hybrid working arrangements for all employees, with clear rules and flexible management, promote better time management and work-life balance. However, those who consider hybrid working to be less demanding and prefer office attendance as an indicator of efficiency can generate pressure and anxiety in female employees when they work in this way.
Having a child has highlighted different needs: you require different time arrangements that are often incompatible with traditional office hours […] we even had to explain to the company that having a young child in home schooling doesn’t allow you to work with 100% focus. It may seem trivial, but we had to clarify it (mother from Naples).
Looking Ahead
For the mothers in this study, remote work emerges both as an enabling resource and a negotiated space. It is valued for the autonomy, flexibility, and well-being it affords, yet remains shaped by cultural, organisational, and structural constraints. Work continues to hold central importance as a source of recognition and legitimacy, though women’s accounts reveal a gradual reorientation toward balance and self-care alongside professional engagement.
Remote work does not fundamentally transform domestic divisions of labour, nor does it guarantee greater equality in caregiving. Instead, it often intensifies the pressure to demonstrate commitment, as women anticipate and counter suspicions that remote work signals reduced productivity.
Our study shows that mothers often turn to remote and hybrid work as a substitute for scarce public care services and rigid workplace provisions. Even after the pandemic, hybrid arrangements remain central to managing school closures, child illness, or Italy’s unusually long summer break. Far from being a marginal perk, hybrid work has become a focal point in union negotiations, reflecting its structural role in sustaining families’ employment.
The organisational dimension is equally critical. Some companies create genuine flexibility through clear procedures, efficient digital tools, and trust-based management styles. Others reproduce ‘flexibility stigma’, where remote work is formally permitted but employees are pressured to overperform, remain constantly available, or prove their commitment through physical presence. Such practices undermine the potential of hybrid work to provide real autonomy, particularly for mothers balancing care responsibilities.
What emerges is the need for a more ambitious policy agenda. Expanding public childcare, aligning school and work schedules, and ensuring fair access beyond restrictive means-testing are crucial to reduce reliance on private markets and intergenerational care. Structural solutions are also needed for summer breaks and after-school programmes, to ease families’ financial and organisational burdens. Finally, companies should adopt management practices that evaluate performance by results rather than presence, so that remote work can truly deliver on its promise of flexibility and balance.
Remote work is thus valuable but insufficient. It can help families navigate fragmented provision, but it cannot replace robust childcare policies, equitable welfare measures, and supportive organisational cultures. Building a sustainable care-work balance in Italy requires systemic change, ensuring that parenthood does not come at the expense of economic security or professional opportunity.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash