Unequal but Balanced: Highly educated mothers’ perceptions of work-life balance during the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland and the Netherlands

One year after passage of the European work-life balance directive, and thus recognition of the need for policy support, measures to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic are shaping parents’ work-life balance in significant ways. Academically, we are challenged to explore whether existing theoretical frameworks hold in this new environment with combined old and new policy frameworks. We are also challenged to understand the nuanced ways in which the first lockdown affects the combination of paid work and care. We address both of these issues, providing a cross-sectional comparative analysis of highly educated mothers’ perceptions of work-life balance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland and the Netherlands. Our findings show that highly educated Finnish mothers have more difficulty combining work and care during the first lockdown than Dutch mothers. The absence of state-provided care during the lockdown creates greater difficulty for full-time working Finnish mothers in a dual-earner/state-carer system than an absence of such care in the Dutch one-and-a-half earner system, where most mothers work part-time. Further analyses suggest variation in part-time and (nearly) full-time hours mitigates the work-life balance experiences of highly educated Dutch mothers. We discuss these findings in light of current theoretical frameworks and highlight avenues for future research.