Work-family balance: new opportunities under digital economy

Nowadays Russian economy is facing serious demographic challenges connected with reduction of working age population which is particularly sharp among the youngest age cohorts equipped with the highest and most up-to-date professional education. It is worth noting that the present policy of stimulating fertility, leading to interruptions in the working career of women, on the one hand contributes to the strategic goal of expanding population reproduction in the long run, but on the other hand, it aggravates the urgent need of the present day to expand the current labor supply. The article explores the problem of activating new opportunities for distance work that open with the development of digital economy, to reduce the out-of-the-labor-force periods on the basis of a more flexible combination of family responsibilities and paid work. Based on the data of the Comprehensive Monitoring of Living Conditions of the Population conducted by Rosstat, we make an attempt to assess the objective and subjective readiness of persons burdened with family responsibilities and thus unable to join standard employment to participate in distance Internet employment, to identify barriers of entry into the distance labor market and to suggest possible ways of promoting flexible employment patterns offering a suitable balance of family and work. Two categories of potential labor force, differing in the nature of family responsibilities which hinder the standard employment option, are pinpointed: women on parental leave and persons heavily engaged in unpaid domestic work, mainly caring for children and for other family members. It is shown that the overwhelming majority of the first category and a significant part of the second one possess basic computer skills and motivation for joining the distance labor market, but their potential remains unrealized. The barriers to the spread of flexible distance employment among persons burdened by family responsibilities are institutional immaturity of the distance labor market and poor development of targeted programs assisting women burdened by family and children to ‘try on themselves’ the new opportunities for flexible employment opening in the digital economy.