Quarantine and Gender Inequality in Academia

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When it comes to gender, the pandemic is not an equalizer.

Quarantine and Gender Inequality in Academia
Photograph: Istock/Choreograph.
Reading time 5 minutes
Reading Time: 5 minutes

The quarantine has exposed the “maternal wall” that blocks the advancement of women in academia.

As the quarantine progresses, a regressive social phenomenon is occurring in the homes of professionals with families. The gender imbalance has become evident in the dynamics of working couples with children, with women compensating for the time and tasks of home and childcare. As a result, the number of academic papers written by women has dropped significantly. This epistemic reality during the pandemic is being written mostly by men. How can this be happening in the 21st-century?

The unbalanced dynamic may be due to an old habit that is still part of gender-based socialization. According to the principles related to labor, work that is paid or professional, by definition, is worth more than household work. The former is monetized and has clear economic value; the other lacks calculation that assigns a measurable economic value. However, the results produced by housework could have more scope and significance than an office job.

Traditionally, the responsability for the sustenance of a family has been assigned to men. Even though today, the workforce is comprised of a competitive female presence, it is common to see men as the financial provider for the family. This severely affects the ability of professional women to work the same amount of time, because, unlike their male counterparts, they are expected to assume the primary role in the household tasks and childcare.

Gender decline in academia

In mid-April, Dr. Elizabeth Hannon, Assistant Director of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, publicly commented on Twitter about a dramatic decrease in the number of articles submitted by female academicians. “Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month. Never seen anything like it.”

Hannon’s brief comment was followed by an avalanche of recognition and empathy from a large number of female academicians for whom the isolation has been a vastly different experience from those of their male partners and colleagues. The brief chronicles were varied, but they all agreed on one thing: There is no time to write when housework and childcare are not a shared responsibility, and it is expected that women comply with these tasks rather than the men.

She is not the only journal editor who has noticed this paradigm. David Samuels, co-editor of the journal Comparative Political Studies, responded to the discussion thread that his colleague opened on Twitter with his own data. Samuels stated that the women’s submissions to his journal attained the same number as in April last year, while those of men increased by 50 percent.

“Publish or perish:” productivity in academia

Alessandra Minello, a statistician and social demographer at the University of Florence, Italy, wrote an article on what the quarantine reveals about the “maternal wall” that blocks the advance of women in academia, a sector that is already showing warning signs and severe problems due to constant pressure on professors to publish. To stay relevant, academicians must present a continuous pace of publications. However, the pressure to be consistently productive does not even consider the particular circumstances generated by a quarantine nor the accentuation of the gender gap that it provokes.

While at home, it is assumed that professors and researchers will have “more time” to work on their articles. This assumption could not be more wrong, and it is even more erroneous for female academicians, who, instead of more free time, have more work now during the quarantine.

Sam Giles, a paleobiologist studying fossil fish, warned on Twitter: “The next person who tweets about how productive Isaac Newton was while working from home will receive my three-year-old son.” Brief comments like these may seem like funny instances of catharsis by professors who are just having a bad day. As we know, Twitter is full of this type of content. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a complex issue that affects the mental health of those who produce knowledge and quantity and quality of their work.

Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of Women’s Budget Group, provides an excellent example of the gender imbalance among academics during isolation: “In most cases, the women do the vast majority of the young childcare and the homeschooling tasks. The men can lock themselves in a study, while the women work at the kitchen or dining room tables, trying to do the home education.”

For her part, Minello states that since the university where she works closed due to the contingency measures of COVID-19, “I have seen more sunrises than ever before in my life. Now, I have to start work before dawn.” This is because Minello has a two-year-old son, and, to do her job, she needs silence and concentration. The early hours, while her child sleeps, are the only times that she can work. And this is just speaking about the workload that she teaches at the university. Minello points out that she now has less time to write scientific articles. “Instead of working, my colleagues and I have a single goal, which is to get through daily life.”

Work broken down into numbers

The root of this lack of academic papers written by women and the overall productivity of women in other areas of labor lies in an unbalanced distribution of work hours at home and childcare when it comes to a family with children. How many hours do the men believe they are doing domestic chores in comparison with the women? One survey conducted by Morning Consult for The New York Times about domestic work and homeschooling during the quarantine revealed that half of the male parents with children under the age of twelve say they do most of the homeschooling. Only 3% of women agreed.

On average, women spend a full hour a day more than men in household and child care tasks, according to the researcher, Theun Pieter van Tienoven, and a survey conducted by the TOR research group. In a situation like the one we live in today, in which we have to stay at home as a family, a man will have more free time, because he will focus primarily on office work. At the same time, the woman will see her schedule extended as she tries to balance her work with the needs of the home and the children, argues van Tienoven.

This distribution is purely social; it does not serve commercial nor global development purposes. It is merely a reminder of the valuation, or rather the devaluation, that we give to the tasks of care, parenting, and home maintenance, and the people who traditionally perform that role whether they work or not, namely, women. Claire Cain Miller, a correspondent for The New York Times, resumes in one line the explanation for this regressive pattern. She says that this social behavior has been in a latent state that has waited for a situation like the pandemic to manifest itself: “One reason women are doing more unpaid labor during lockdown is simple — they always do.”

Sofía García-Bullé

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0