Research shows that many female professors spend less time on their professional responsibilities and more time on care responsibilities, homeschooling, and housekeeping. Their male colleagues and partners have not experienced the same losses. What does this mean for the future of women’s work?

The pandemic is nearly a year old. That means most of us have been reconfiguring our job, home, family, and social roles for months. It also means that this has been the case long enough that researchers have measured and published some of the professional changes for working people during the last 11 months. Notably, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the unique consequences of COVID-19 that women have faced and will continue to face. 

Researchers surveyed about 900,000 faculty members in institutions of higher education (IHEs) all over the US and Europe. Of those, about 20,000 responses were usable for this set of analyses. The paper, published by Drs. Tatyana Deryugina, Olga Shurchkov, and Jenna E. Stearns, finds that many of academia’s gender inequities that predated COVID-19 have been exacerbated. The authors also find new imbalances that disproportionately affect women. 

For example, before the onset of the virus, women reported spending about 30 fewer minutes on research per day than did men. Women also reported that they spent 20 more minutes on other job responsibilities and 40 more minutes on childcare per day. In a profession where research productivity is the key to job security and better wages, lost research productivity is a professional risk. It is well-established that women tend to be asked to carry out a disproportionate number of service obligations in their faculty roles and, moreover, that pre-tenure faculty and women of color tend to carry the heaviest service loads. These additional, assigned responsibilities may account, in part, for the imbalance of time spent on research. In turn, and under the best of circumstances, women are less likely to reach the highest ranks of the faculty. The data bear this out: pre-COVID, only about a third of full professors (the highest rank) in the US were women.

Time use has changed dramatically for all parent faculty members but the losses are particularly acute for women. Female parent professors lost about 90 minutes of research per day, compared to about 30 minutes daily lost by male parent professors. Male and female parents of children younger than seven years old lost time, but women lost 120 minutes on average daily while men lost 90 minutes. Many universities and IHEs have offered tenure clock extensions, and more women (18%) than men (14%) have reported that they plan to opt in to those extensions. Once again, this means further delays in salary bumps and job security for women who are currently redirecting much of their time to care responsibilities and housekeeping. 

Kim Hooper recently said in a Scary Mommy article: “It goes without saying that a global pandemic would have an inevitably catastrophic impact on the economy. What should not be inevitable is the catastrophic impact on women.” Women have, for decades, been made to choose between careers and families because systemic biases, low-wage jobs, and workplace discrimination tend to work against equity for women in workplaces. The findings reported by Deryugina, Shurchkov, and Stearns are just another example of contemporary factors that amplify an old problem. Hooper warns that the pandemic may have set us back 60 years in terms of equity gains for women in workplaces. 

Nevertheless, some organizations are taking steps to account for women’s unique situations and to protect their trajectories toward tenure and long-term career stability. Those might include reconfiguring promotion standards, creative arrangements between education students and faculty members’ own children (as in the case of Barnard College), or relocating service assignments to tenured faculty members. Long-term, however, the pandemic will require us all to think about how policies around work hours, flexibility, child care, and leave either help or harm women’s careers.