**1. Introduction**

The requirement to fulfill both professional responsibilities combined with unpaid care obligations has complexified the situation of working women and has negatively influenced their ability to achieve equity with men [1,2]. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the challenges working women face because, due to the lockdown, many women were required to work from home. Their children also stayed at home and needed to be cared for and educated remotely. Working women suddenly had "second" or "third shift" responsibilities of educating their children alongside their working and caring roles. These additional athome demands, along with the closure of schools and daycare, meant that working women with care responsibilities experienced a major shift in their work–life balance [3,4]. Domestic workers were also quarantined, placing the burden of housekeeping and dependent care on families who normally paid for these services. In the European Union, the burden for childcare increased from 31 to 37 h per week for women and from 16 to 23 h per week for men. In Italy, 44 percent of working women kept their jobs by working from home, compared to 30 percent of men. Further, 33 percent of women and 37 percent of men stopped working because of the lockdown. The burden of prepandemic housekeeping and childcare fell predominantly on women, and this burden continued during the pandemic, with men increasing their childcare somewhat but not their housekeeping [5]. The pandemic

**Citation:** Thompson, R.J. The Impact of COVID-19 on Working Women with Caring Responsibilities: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. *Merits* **2023**, *3*, 96–114. https://doi.org/10.3390/ merits3010006

Academic Editor: Wendy M. Purcell

Received: 16 November 2022 Revised: 25 December 2022 Accepted: 5 January 2023 Published: 9 January 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

consequently made it more difficult for women working at home to achieve a healthy work– life balance. The lack of a work–life balance is associated with the increased depression experienced by women during the pandemic and may have led to a significant setback to women's long search for equality in the workplace [3].

The work–life balance of women has been a concern since women started entering the professions in the 1970s. Work–life balance has been variously defined, and the term has been criticized for implying that there should be separation between work and life and equal weight given to work and life [6,7]. Greenhaus and Allen [8] defined work–life balance as individuals' satisfaction with both their work and family roles and their ability to exercise them effectively in accordance with their values. Grzywacz and Carlson [9] described work–life balance as achieving expectations about work and life within a particular social context. Work–life balance in these two definitions is hence used metaphorically to refer to subjective valuation rather than to equal time devoted to each or separation of the two. Guest [7] attempted to reconcile the various meanings of work–life balance by developing a model of analysis that includes the nature, causes, and consequences of work–life balance. He characterized the nature of work–life balance in terms of objective and subjective indicators; the determinants of work–life balance in terms of individual and organizational factors; and the consequences of work–life balance in terms of work and life satisfaction, health and wellbeing, stress, behavior and performance at work and home, and impact of one's behavior on others at work and in the home. As the above mentioned authors have emphasized [7–9], work–life balance is typically viewed as being related to health and wellbeing, especially psychological health. The lack of balance is associated with increased stress and even burnout. The lack of work–life balance has been characterized either as work–life conflict, where work interferes with the enjoyment of family and life outside of work, and life–work conflict, where family interferes with work and career success [7–9]. These two forms of conflict derive from the interaction between work and life, leading many scholars to replace the term "work-life balance" with "work-life interaction", "work-life interface", or other terms [6]. Recognizing the controversy over the term, "work-life balance" will be employed in this article subjectively in terms of the study participants' satisfaction with both work and family roles, more objectively by their perceived performance of these roles, and the conflicts they identify between work and family.

Solutions to a healthier work–life balance generally focus on increased flexibility at work, more childcare resources, and setting boundaries on work availability such as not working in the evenings or on the weekend. The phenomenon and women's struggle to achieve this balance have been widely researched, as summarized by Brown and Yates [10]. In the 1970s, women went to work and worked at home and hence had two full-time jobs, women's discontent and burn-out led women to demand more flexible schedules and "work-life balance", which became a topic of considerable study by academics. By the mid 2000s, work–life balance "has become an ethical imperative, as an aspiration that strongly influences how they think about and manage their lives" [11].

Terms such as 'shecession' and 'the great resignation' were used to reflect the unequal impact of the pandemic on women and, in many cases, forced their exodus from the workplace due to the incompatibility of working alongside managing the shift in their caring responsibilities [12,13]. A 2020 McKinsey & Company report found that during the pandemic, more than one in four women surveyed globally in the corporate world downsized their careers or departed from the workforce, something that the report points out that many would have considered unthinkable before the pandemic [14]. The KFF Women's Health Survey showed that (1) one in ten women quit their jobs due to a pandemicrelated reason, with almost half reporting that they felt unsafe in the workplace; (2) one in ten women who were working mothers with children quit because of COVID-19, with half of them citing school closures as one of the reasons, and three of ten reporting they quit because school or daycare was closed; and (3) 47 percent of working mothers overall took sick leave because school or daycare was closed. This included 65 percent of low-income

women and 70 percent of those working part-time jobs [15]. Because of the disruption caused by the pandemic, women, more than men, have experienced depression, and a 2021 McKinsey & Company report found that almost one-half of all respondents experienced more burnout than even in 2020 [16].

The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of a sample of working women with care responsibilities in order to derive recommendations for postpandemic working structures and arrangements. The study looked at the unique experiences of four women living in the USA, Latin America, and Africa, across a range of personal and organizational contexts. The study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to understand and interpret the lived experiences and meaning-making of these women [17]. IPA was selected as a methodology because it allows the generation of an understanding of participnts' subjective experiences along with the complexities and sensitivities of living through lockdown during the pandemic. IPA "enables the researcher to move beyond predefined abstract categories and allow individuals to explore experiences in their own terms . . . within a particular social or cultural context" [17].

By providing a range of individual women's stories, this study supplements the many surveys that were carried out during the pandemic and illuminates how women themselves made sense of navigating their work and care responsibilities during the pandemic. It adds a much richer volume of information that can be employed to redesign the workplace as women return to work and children return to school.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**

An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was employed to explore how women in different situations and countries constructed their life stories during the pandemic and the personal meanings they created through the interpretation of their experience.

IPA is derived from phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ideography and is based on the writing of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty [17–25]. Phenomenology approaches the object of attention, so it has the opportunity to reveal itself as itself and on its own terms [18]. The primary focus of phenomenological studies is "to understand the lifeworld through space of meaning" [18]. IPA is hermeneutic in that it is an interpretive process in which the researcher attempts to understand how individuals make sense of their world. It is idiographic in that the researcher is concerned with understanding each of the participants in the study [18]. The intention of IPA is "to investigate and develop a deeper understanding of the meanings particular experiences hold for participants through the collection of their rich and detailed accounts that consider their involvement in their context" [21].

IPA studies involve a detailed analysis of the accounts of a relatively small group of from four to ten participants generally captured by semistructured interviews, focus groups, or sometimes diaries [17]. Patterns of meaning are then culled from the transcripts and developed into subthemes which are then organized into superordinate themes [18–26]. The researcher attempts to produce a "coherent, third-person, and psychologically informed description, which tries to get as 'close' to the participant's view as is possible" [17–25]. The researcher then attempts to develop an interpretive analysis that contextualizes the participants' descriptions in relation to "a wider, social, cultural, and perhaps even theoretical context" [17]. The researcher, in other words, expresses what she thinks participants mean by the statements they make.

The small group of participants in an IPA is selected by purposive sampling so that participants have an experience in common and share a particular perspective. IPA does not collect data to test hypotheses. Researchers attempt to suspend or bracket their own preconceptions about the data in order to grasp the experiential world of the participants. They code the transcripts in detail and shift back and forth between the claims of the participants and their own researchers' interpretation of the meaning of those claims in a hermeneutic stance of inquiry and meaning-making [17–25] in an attempt to make sense

of the participants' attempts to make sense of their own experiences, creating a double hermeneutic [17–25].

In the study described in this article, participants were purposively recruited via social media and personal networks based upon their "second" or "third shift" responsibilities. All the women were employed for more than 22 h a week and had primary (sole or shared) caring responsibilities for at least one school-aged child.

The IPA included open semistructured interviews consisting of prompts but no closed questions. The IPA was accompanied by two visual techniques, "a special object" and "The River of Experience", aimed at capturing metaphors that explained what was important to the women participants as well as what represented their journey during the pandemic [24,25].

The unstructured interviews included prompts to describe participants' work and care responsibilities. Participants were asked to bring the special object to the interview and explain its meaning. The object served as a sort of metaphor for the participants [24,25]. As Kim and Denicola pointed out, even if we are not aware of this fact, metaphors impact how we reason, think, frame, and solve problems we face in the world and subsequently take action to solve [25]. "Metaphors help create realities for us, especially social realities and are the structures of our lived world. Uncovering the metaphors people live by and exploring how they are used by them in discourse enables us to uncover patterns that shape thoughts, feelings and actions at both an individual and collective level" [24]. By describing the object during the interview, participants could articulate how they perceive themselves and "the constructs that they impose on themselves" [24] in a more visual and anecdotal expression.

Participants were also requested to draw a "River of Experience" that described their journey during the pandemic prior to the interview and to guide the researcher along the river during the interview. Their River of Experience [24,25] visually represented the journey of their life through the pandemic, and each bend, waterfall, lifeboat, or log in their river signified a meaningful event or experience that influenced the direction they took or decisions they made. The River serves as a powerful metaphor for exploring lived experiences meant to surface unconsciously held beliefs among professionals [24,25].

The River is based on the observation that people intrinsically seek connecting threads in the history of their lives, and it helps people put their previously unreflected flow of experiences into words that meaningfully connect them to the present. Additionally, pictorial methods help participants explore their deeper meanings as they engage in a creative process of describing aspects of their lives in a reflective way [24,25].

After transcribing the interview, a summary of the lifeworld the participants described was drafted. Then, the text of the interviews were coded for insights into the participants' experiences and perspectives on their world during the pandemic. The codes that emerged were subsequently cataloged from patterns that represented themes derived from recurring ideas, thoughts, and feelings the participants expressed. The themes expressed what seemed to matter to the participants. These subthemes were then grouped under broader superordinate themes. Finally, recommendations identified by participants for the postpandemic workplace were identified from the transcripts.
