Gender, race and parenthood impact academic productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic: from survey to action (original) (raw)
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The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on gendered research productivity and its correlates
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Female researchers may have experienced more difficulties than their male counterparts since the COVID-19 outbreak because of gendered housework and childcare. Using Microsoft Academic Graph data from 2016 to 2020, this study examined how the proportion of female authors in academic journals on a global scale changed in 2020 (net of recent yearly trends). We observed a decrease in research productivity for female researchers in 2020, mostly as first authors, followed by last author position. Female researchers were not necessarily excluded from but were marginalised in research. We also identified various factors that amplified the gender gap by dividing the authors’ backgrounds into individual, organisational and national characteristics. Female researchers were more vulnerable when they were in their mid-career, affiliated to the least influential organisations, and more importantly from less gender-equal countries with higher mortality and restricted mobility as a result of COVID...
The Great Equalizer? Gender, Parenting, and Scholarly Productivity During the Global Pandemic
PS: Political Science & Politics, 2021
ABSTRACTHas the global COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted the scholarly productivity of academics? Do gender and parenting magnify its effect? To obtain insight into the changes the pandemic has wrought in the lives and careers of women and parents in academia, we surveyed scholars in political science and international studies. The survey was in the field during the period in which many academics were experiencing shelter-at-home orders and adjusting to a new reality. It captures initial reactions to changed circumstances as well as the fears and anticipated consequences of the disruptions. We find that perceptions of a negative impact are broadly shared. The open-ended responses suggest that the pandemic may widen the gender and parent productivity gaps. Although further analysis is needed to better understand the effect of the pandemic on scholarly productivity, we conclude that the pandemic exacerbates existing structural inequalities.
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ABSTRACTThis article explores the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the productivity of male and female academics and whether the ongoing health crisis will exacerbate further the existing gender gap in academia in both the short and long terms. We present early evidence of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on women’s research productivity using online survey data supplemented by interview data with regional and international female political scientists. The interviews and survey findings reveal gender disparities in perceived research productivity and service workloads during the pandemic. The results also shed initial light on the pandemic’s impact on the research productivity of academics who are parents, especially among women.
Individual-level researcher data confirm the widening gender gap in publishing rates during COVID-19
eLife, 2022
Publishing is part and parcel of a successful academic career, and Covid-19 has amplified gender disparities in manuscript submissions and authorships. We used longitudinal publication data on 431,207 scientists in biology, chemistry, and clinical and basic medicine to quantify the differential impact of Covid-19 on women's and men's annual publishing rates. In a difference-in-differences analysis, we estimated that the average gender difference in publication productivity increased from -0.26 in 2019 (corresponding to a 17% lower output for women than men) to -0.35 in 2020 (corresponding to a 24% lower output for women than men). An age-group comparison showed a widening gender gap for both early career and mid-career scientists. The increasing gender gap was most pronounced among highly productive authors and scientists in clinical medicine and biology. Our study demonstrates the importance of reinforcing institutional commitments to diversity through policies that support...
The Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Women and Caregivers in Academia
2021
Mounting evidence Evidence is mounting that women in academia have disproportionately been affected by the pandemic. Recent research points to new gender gaps in productivity and publishing, with fewer women publishing articles and manuscripts. 1 And in addition to these professional challenges, women in academia are also facing unique personal challenges during the pandemic, including balancing childcare and home responsibilities while working towards achieving tenure in an academic pipeline where it is already challenging for women to succeed. 2 These types of gender disparities have been well-documented outside of academia as well. Some scholars have even taken it upon themselves to start building out bibliographies to capture relevant works. 3 Women have suffered more job losses than men during the pandemic; as of November 2020, women held 5.3 million fewer jobs than they did before the pandemic began in February, compared with a 4.6 million shortfall for men. 4 And thousands of women are voluntarily leaving the workforce, 5 likely due at least in part to the lack of childcare options available to women and the additional responsibilities they are taking on within their homes. 6
2021
The discourse on research productivity during the early months of COVID-19 has been dominated by bibliometric and quantitative studies highlighting the fewer publications from women scholars compared to men, but few considered the reasons behind this phenomenon. This paper offers new empirical insights into the experiences and perceptions of women scholars during the early stages of the pandemic using the feminist standpoint theory approach to understand why they have been seemingly less productive. Our findings, based on 101 qualitative survey responses, illustrate the centrality of support with respect to childcare, professional-emotional support from peers and mentors that were lost. Restricted access to institutional facilities, resources, loss of structure, additional time required to prepare for online teaching, and increased service load have negatively impacted research productivity. These factors are compounded by poor mental health with high cognitive and emotional tolls, ...
2022
Economic and political agencies have reported a worldwide increase in gender inequalities during the CO-VID-19 pandemic, exposing the frailty of the advances in gender equality in the context of a global crisis. Here, we provide an overview on how the COVID-19 pandemic amplified gender-related vulnerabilities in Brazil, establishing a parallel with the pre-pandemic scenario and evaluating many aspects of the problem, including motherhood and racial issues. At the same time, we also discuss how the abrupt disruption in the labor routine during the COVID-19 pandemic overloaded Brazilian women with household and childcare activities and, more specifically, how women's careers and scientific-academic production were affected. Briefly, the workload and stress imposed on female researchers force them to choose between their professional accomplishments and their families, thus exacerbating gender disparities within the Brazilian academia. Studies and governmental reports reveal that such a burden was even more prominent for mothers with young children and for black scientists. Finally, we describe examples of affirmative actions aimed at counterbalancing gender inequalities within the Brazilian academia, which became crucial to mitigate the effects of the social upheaval during the pandemic.
Gendered disruptions in academic publishing during COVID-19 (Golubovic, Inglis and Connell 2022)
American Ethnologist, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted work patterns in academia. There is mounting evidence that men's publishing productivity increased while women's decreased. Yet most studies of this phenomenon have analyzed authorship and peer review data separately, without considering their interrelationship. We conceptualize authorship and peer review together as visible and invisible forms of labor, a lens that connects service work to other forms of gendered unpaid labor. Drawing on a data set of author and review activity at American Ethnologist from 2014 to 2021, we blend quantitative analysis with qualitative insights from our positions as the journal's editorial assistants. We find that in 2020 women performed staggeringly more service work than men relative to their rates of manuscript submission. Our findings disrupt the discourse of "a return to normal," which ignores the differential effects of our collective pandemic experience.
COVID-19 effect on the gender gap in academic publishing
The authors wanted to verify a popular belief that women scholars have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied the first names of authors of 266,409 articles from 2813 journals in 21 disciplines, and we found no significant differences between men and women in publication patterns between 2021, 2020, and 2019 overall. However, we found significant differences in publication patterns between gender in different disciplines. In addition, in disciplines where the proportion of women authors is higher, there are fewer single-authored articles. In the multi-author articles if the first author is female, there is more gender balance among authors, although there are still fewer women co-authors.