by Andrea Irarrazaval
Woman, wife, mother, CEO Carbon BioCapture
Alumni IVLP 2014
A few days ago, I was asked how I was facing the challenges of family life, especially motherhood along with my work life in a pandemic: how I reconciled my duties as CEO of Carbon BioCapture, President of the WEAmericas Foundation, with the intrinsic and multiple duties of being a mother, a wife, a housewife, a nurse, a teacher, a psychologist, a social worker, a hairdresser, a chef, a soccer player, a conflict mediator and many other roles that the "new reality" has appointed us.
I believe that these last 14 months have defied "the laws of nature." Women, who were already accustomed to working long hours, even working from home to enhance our professional projects, now have suddenly found ourselves facing a new reality: the complexity of closed schools for those of us with young children, who are at home 24/7, with school in virtual mode and having us extend our time to learn about their school work, doing our own work, taking care of the house, and being good wives and, at the same time, looking fantastic. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), women undoubtedly having triple working hours (doing domestic, family and professional work) is a complex process that requires permanent reorganization, a dynamic that includes fewer hours of sleep, less time for self-care and less time for social relationships.
A year ago, the New York Times published “even before the coronavirus crisis, women spent around four hours a day doing unpaid work, such as washing clothes, shopping for food and cleaning, compared to roughly 2.5 hours in the case of men."
Women of our generation, with a strong influence of technology and communications, even before the arrival of the pandemic, we were already in a strong process of reconciling the challenges of our jobs and domestic chores and especially the upbringing of our own children, as technology sometimes turns into a double-edged sword that allows us to be in constant communication for the different tasks we perform. But, at the same time it does not let us disconnect and focus on the other tasks that also require our attention. Working at home, in pre-pandemic times, allowed us to extend working hours at home, as we are mothers, wives and workers, who are constantly on the move. But now since the pandemic, the hours are hardly felt and the work never ends, because both worlds have now entwined in a kind of existential parallelism that leaves us floating in the infinity of time.
The greatest challenge for those of us who fulfill this triple function is the social demand for "success": you must be a good mother, but also a successful professional, a good wife with dinner on time, a neat house and, also, fit. Although time management is a universal problem, for women who have a family and work it is a daily juggling act.
I strongly believe that women possess the ability to expand, to transcend, everything in life carries risks inherent to human life, but it is worth daring to follow our ideas, to seek dreams, in an environment of solidarity, collaboration and non-competition.
