COVID-19 set everyone back on their heels as countries—essentially the world—came to a screeching halt. The stay-at-home orders and state shutdowns have been especially hard on working parents. Where children were previously in daycare, school, or with a sitter, they are now underfoot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In families with two working parents, who bears the brunt of childcare (and household care) during working days? Traditionally, women spend more time caretaking than men. Is that true during the pandemic, and if so, are female scientists being negatively affected?
Early data indicates that yes, women are bearing the brunt of life care during the pandemic, leading to decreased research productivity.
On April 18, Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, wrote on Twitter that she’d received a “negligible number of submissions…from women in the last month.” She also said she had “never seen anything like it.”
Hannon struck a chord with her tweet, as the responses came in fast and furious from female researchers expressing their frustration with not having the time to write or research.
For example, a female Ph.D. sociology professor at Edgewood College tweeted in response, “My research time now goes to childcare, cooking, cleaning the house (spouse works in ER), checking in on/grocery deliver to my parents, [and] providing zoom technology support to the grandparents. I have pushed paper deadlines back by 6 mo[nths] [and] will not be attending my fall conference.”
But as a female professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center brought up, for women, juggling responsibilities is not new, albeit the pandemic version is a little different.
“Fundamentally, women get stuck juggling roles just to survive in academia and always had this problem at home. Clinical, teaching [and] admin all increased with pandemic with online teaching [and] telemed, plus shift/work schedules changed. Then there’s home...,” she tweeted.
Hannon tweeted that she was planning to collaborate with other journals to generate a large enough sample size to examine trends from the beginning of the pandemic to the end (whenever that is.) That data analysis is still ongoing.
David Samuels, co-editor of the journal Comparative Political Studies, responded to Hannon’s initial tweets with a similar viewpoint. He said his journal submissions were up 25 percent in April, with women submitting the same in April 2020 as April 2019. However, male submissions went up almost 50- percent comparing April 2020 with April 2019.
At the same time this Twitter discussion was taking place, Kathleen Dolan and Jennifer L. Lawless, co-editors of the American Journal of Political Science, were busy crunching data on submission and publication rates of women and men over the past three years. It’s a larger effort to understand the patterns of submission and publication by authors from underrepresented groups; but given the current climate, they took a minute to examine COVID-19 trends.
The editors report that of the 108 manuscripts submitted from March 15 to April 19, 54 female and 108 male authors were represented. In the dataset, women comprised 33 percent of submitting authors—which is actually higher than the 25 percent from 2017 to 2019. At the manuscript level, 41 of the 108 papers had at least one female author. That’s 38 percent of the total, which is again a slightly greater share than the 35 percent in the larger data set.
“This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 hasn’t taken a toll on female authors, though. Women submitted only 8 of the 46 solo-authored papers during this time. Their share of 17 percent is down from 22 percent in the larger data set. As a percentage change, that’s substantial. Even if women’s overall submission rates are up, they seem to have less time to submit their own work than men do amid the crisis,” Dolan and Lawless wrote in an blog on the AJPS website titled “It Takes a Submission: Gendered Patterns in the Pages of AJPS.”
In a Laboratory Equipment survey with a limited sample size, 56 percent of women said their parental responsibilities are negatively affecting time normally dedicated to writing papers, compared with 33 percent of men who said the same. A higher percentage of men (67 percent) said their writing is unaffected by parental and household responsibilities than women (44 percent).
In an article published the same week as this data, statistician and social demographer Alessandra Minello said there is only one real solution to address the unproportionally negative impacts female professionals feel thanks to COVID-19: a long-term investment in gender equality.
“I expect that data on publication records over the next couple of years will show that parents in academia were disadvantaged relative to non-parents in 2020,” Minello wrote in Nature. “Those data might also reveal the consequences for women. Care work is, in fact, unbalanced—even among highly educated couples.
When married mothers and fathers in the United States are compared, the former spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare. In the gender-egalitarian countries of northern Europe, women still do almost two-thirds of the unpaid work. Even among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners, women do most of the care work. Overall, the COVID-19 experience is changing the way research is done…and we will need to pay attention to the effects this has on disparities.”