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Research studies on academic work and the COVID-19 crisis have clearly shown that the pandemic crisis contributed to exacerbating pre-existing gender gaps. Although the research has been extensive in this regard, it has focused more on the widening of the “motherhood penalty”, while other groups of academics are blurred. Even more underinvestigated and not yet fully explained are the intersections between further axes of diversity, often because the research conducted during the pandemic was based on a small volume of in-depth data. By drawing on interview data from a wider national research project, this article aims to contribute to this debate by adopting an intersectional approach. In investigating daily working life and work–life balance during the pandemic of a highly heterogeneous sample of 127 Italian academics, this article sheds light on how gender combines with other axes of asymmetry, particularly class (precarious versus stable and prestigious career positions) and age (individuals’ life-course stage), to produce specific conditions of interrelated (dis)advantage for some academics. The analysis reveals three household and family life course types that embody the interlocking of gender, class, and age within a specific social location with unequal, and possibly long-term, consequences for the quality of working life, well-being, and careers of academics, living alone or with parents, couples without children or with grown-up children, and couples with young children and other family members in need of care.

In the sociological literature, several studies have shown that the economic and organizational changes of the last decade, including the growth of the service sector and the diffusion of new technologies, have altered the productive and reproductive processes as well as their spatial and temporal dimensions typical of Fordism. In order to shed light on how knowledge workers facing job flexibility and insecurity position themselves with respect to the practices of (de)constructing the boundaries between productive and reproductive domains, specific analytical tools were applied, originating from the interdisciplinary field of boundary-studies, within a perspective focused on gender differences and the subjective experiences of time. With this approach, a discourse analysis was conducted on 37 qualitative interviews with knowledge workers who handle job flexibility and insecurity and who have care responsibilities to uphold at home. The results show that the permeability and flexibility of new (re)productive practices, often presented in neoliberal economy as new opportunities for knowledge workers, especially if they are female, are experienced differently by men and women: for men they represent a new control source, whereas for women they constitute a fictitious, if not constricting, process.