Women academics are falling behind in lockdown

A lament about a lack of productivity runs through social media these days. Coronavirus lockdowns have created a kind of ennui and exhaustion, resulting in people slowing down in general. But in one field—academia—the drop-off for women in particular is measurable. As men have increased their research while home these past couple months, women have lowered their submissions to academic journals, indicating that women are less able to do their research while in stuck in the house.

The speculation began in April. “Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, tweeted on April 18. “Never seen anything like it.”

Women on the thread heartily agreed, offering explanations for what’s going on. “My experience exactly,” replied Columbia University volcanologist Einat Lev. “I just received an email from a male colleague of my same rank and family status (young kids). Except, he has a full-time stay at home wife. His email read ‘this is a strange time but at least now, away from teaching, I can focus on writing.’ Sigh & Scream.”

It’s a stereotypically gendered reality. While stuck at home, mothers in the UK are providing at least 50 percent more childcare overall and spending 10-30 percent more time than fathers home-schooling their children, The Guardian reported in early May—leaving little time for academic research. At the same time, submissions from men to the Comparative Political Studies journal were up almost 50 percent in April, according to its co-editor David Samuels.

Anneli Jefferson, a lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University, told The Guardian in a story today that while caring for her home and two young boys, research has to take a back seat. “Research is really important, but it’s not urgent,” she said. “It’s not usually the thing that someone’s breathing down your neck about.” While many people are suffering from a lack of productivity while in lockdown, Jefferson said “women will probably be disadvantaged more strongly.”

“Many female academics will have partners with a more structured job with online meetings that are non-negotiable,” she said. “And it must be even harder for single mothers, because they are doing all this on their own.”

To add insult to injury, men don’t seem to grasp just how much their women partners are doing at home. A May New York Times poll found that while women in the U.S. are handling the majority of home-schooling kids, men see the situation differently: Nearly half of men with children under 12 surveyed said they spent more time on teaching kids than their spouse, yet just 3 percent of women said their spouse is doing more. Eighty percent of mothers say they spend more time on home-schooling. Seventy percent of women said they’re fully or mostly responsible for housework these days, and 66 percent said the same for childcare.

“Being forced to be at home is amplifying the differences we already know exist,” said Barbara Risman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was part of a group of sociologists who analyzed the Times data. “What terrifies me for the future is if it will push women out of the labor force in a way that will be very hard to overcome.”

James Wilsdon, director of the Research on Research Institute based at the UK-based Wellcome Trust, agreed, but added a bit of hope: “All the juggling and the hidden labor of domesticity that is part of many academics’ real lives is now being brought into view,” he told The Guardian. “Maybe when those things are raised in the future, universities will be better at understanding.”