Trabalho e pandemia: os arranjos do trabalho feminino em tempos de confinamento

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic has changed the dynamics of life in various aspects, such as the social, economic and health aspects, and impacted the world of work, which is the subject of this research, especially female work, since women, as the main providers of care, were and they are overwhelmed with the challenge of reconciling reproductive and professional work within the home. The present work proposes to analyze the arrangements of female work, from the perspective of higher education professors, more precisely, of t professors of stricto sensu postgraduate courses at the Federal University of Alfenas (UNIFAL-MG), campus Varginha, MG, with the main objective of identifying the impacts of the pandemic on the reproductive and productive work of women placed to work at home, due to the pandemic. In order to reach the general objective, the specific objectives consisted of: characterizing the professors of the three stricto sensu Graduate Programs offered by the university; investigate the difficulties faced by professors; and understand the impacts of the pandemic on women's work. In order to carry out this research, a robust theoretical framework was built in principle, with the aim of contextualizing the research and, above all, understanding the state of the art of the researched themes. From the theoretical construction, it was possible to elaborate the empirical part of this work, which consisted of conducting interviews with the professors of the mentioned Institution. Subsequently, the interviews were submitted to the analysis process based on the theoretical and methodological approach of Critical Discourse Analysis from the perspective of Teun A. Van Dijk. As a result, it was possible to verify that women were the most impacted by the pandemic period, given the transformations in their jobs, the fact of being at home made the journeys expand and overlap, there was an accumulation and a excess of both academic and care attributions, which ended up generating physical and mental overload in the interviewees, and this overload remains, even with the return of academic activities within the institution. Thus, the elaboration of the theoretical framework, combined with the trajectories of the women who worked at home in the pandemic, made it possible to reflect on the exploitation of female work today.