How are you? Impressions on Covid-19 Lockdown from Women Scientists in Italy

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives. The first and unexpected lockdown in Italy has seriously upset people daily routine, working organisation, socialisation and interactions with colleagues and relatives. To overcome the physical isolation and collect impressions, the "How are you?" online questionnaire was created and shared as a conversation among friends. Text mining techniques have been applied to almost one hundred replies, to highlight similarities and differences in the experiences lived during the lockdown, changes in daily actions, thoughts and reflections. Our findings show that the lockdown period was experienced as a moment of physical and relational confinement, provoking feelings such as fear, sadness and restlessness concerning the near future. However, it appears that many respondents accepted this lockdown as an opportunity to reorder their own lives, in terms of physical activities such as daily habits, and personal relationships and priorities. The fresco on which the paper is based is unique in terms of time, space, gender and professions. The written conversations took place from mid-March to the end of May 2020, i.e. during a period in which Italy was the first country in Europe to confine people home for all but essential reasons. Selected testimonies have been chosen among women professionals in science, mainly higher education professors and researchers. Since the questionnaire was aimed to collect free narratives, explicitly asked "from a few syllables to pages", it allows to hear researchers' voices, which often risk to remain unheard, and to collect them in a direct, fresh manner, without the constraints of structured questions. Topics covered in the conversations are highly gendered, including working conditions, work-life balance, family care. Moreover, since the initiative stemmed from a women scientists' association, respondents provided interesting inputs regarding both gendered visions of the pandemic before and during it and their expectations afterwards centring on the roles that women play.