Women in Between: The Careers and Personal Adaptations of Italian Professional Women during the Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic, conceptualized as a total social fact in Maussian terms, imposed a sudden and massive reorganization of work through smart working, transforming it into a cultural object “contaminated” by the pandemic experience. Within this scenario, the chapter places women workers at the center of the analysis: an international survey on stress and changes in everyday life conducted during the first wave yielded, in Italy, an overwhelmingly female sample, which led to focusing specifically on how women professionals experienced, interpreted, and managed smart working during and after the pandemic. The study, combining a quantitative analysis of the survey with two waves of in‑depth interviews with journalists, social workers, show workers, and teachers, examines the ways in which women negotiated technologies, professional identity, care responsibilities, and career trajectories over the pandemic time