Editorial: The COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The implication for work-life/family balance and gender inequalities

The need for action for Sustainable Development pursuing gender equality (Objective 5 in the UN 2030 Agenda) finds, among the multiple areas of commitment, a direct link with the domain of work-life balance, a topical issue for gender equality. In this direction, the European Union issued a new Work-life Balance Directive in 2019, aimed at promoting gender equality through increased female economic participation and a fairer share of unpaid care responsibilities between men and women. Despite the relevance given to this topic, several factors still damper the progress toward greater gender equality and jeopardize the potential impact of national and transnational policies, including those in the European gender mainstreaming framework (Ahrens et al., 2018; Lomazzi and Crespi, 2019). For example, the deterioration of economic conditions because of the crisis (Karamessini and Rubery, 2013), austerity policies (Anastasiou et al., 2015), and the institutionalization of far-right, populist, and Euro-skepticism movements (Meret and Siim, 2013; Akkerman, 2015) can contribute to a traditional backlash. In this scenario of permanent crisis, the pandemic might represent a further threat to gender equality: Pre-existing gender inequalities (EIGE, 2019) further increase also because of the gendered implications of the increased challenges to work-life/family balance, as papers belonging to this Research Topic show.