Occupational Stress, Working from Home, and Job Sustainability: Another Gender Issue?

Abstract

Aim of the paper is to analyse the occurrence of occupational stress across European Union countries, considering gender and job sustainability as determinants, with a specific attention to the effects of home-based work. Although COVID-19 pandemic has brought such issues into a novel spotlight, to detect the response pattern towards occupational stress we chose to employ the latest official data collected by the Sixth European Working Condition Survey developed and carried out in a pre-COVID-19 scenario. This information may provide a reliable picture of working conditions, which are likely to become the “new normal” across Europe, at least for a subset of workers. Descriptive analyses do not seem to help disclosing any different response behaviour with specific respect to reported stress by gender, even when combined with the condition of working from home. Whereas a noteworthy finding of our study is that results from the implemented ordered probit model display that some differences in the response pattern do exist and are even substantial. A question still arises about whether and to what extent hybrid forms of work are here to stay and even to grow in the post-pandemic period. Some of the critical features of teleworking-from-home emerged during the epidemic indicate that the implementation of policies at a national and, ideally, even supra-national level is clearly necessary. However, since both occupations and company organizations are strongly differentiated, it seems also that the enterprises are allowed some flexibility in defining corporate policies for teleworking practices, especially aiming at providing workers with improved and more sustainable working conditions, such as a less distressing environment and more supportive managerial styles.