Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2023, 24 (1): 36-61 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2023.001

Nurses and the COVID-19 Pandemic – Practices and Identity Construction in Formal and Informal Care

Marie Pospíšilová

Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i.

The pandemic highlighted the importance of both formal and informal care and magnified gender inequalities in this area. Women were more represented in care-related frontline professions (including nurses), but they were also more often responsible for providing childcare when institutions (especially schools and nurseries) were closed. This paper builds on criticism aimed at the separate study of formal and informal care and explores the interconnections between the two in the case of Czech nurses with young children, who during the pandemic experienced increased demands in both formal and informal care. We are interested in how they experienced these increased demands, which we explore through the practices and constructions of identities in these domains and their gendered nature. Our findings show that nurses largely adopted individualised strategies and solutions to cope with the increased demands of care, which explains the low level of willingness on their part to publicly seek change. We conclude that the pandemic exacerbated gender inequalities in formal and informal care (as nurses strove to succeed as professionals and mothers), and that any changes in the gender order are temporary.

Keywords: Keywords: nurses, COVID-19 pandemic, gender, care, childcare, childcare institutions

Received: October 7, 2022; Revised: June 26, 2023; Accepted: June 29, 2023; Published: September 6, 2023  Show citation