While many in academic circles predicted that female scientists, particularly mothers, would be disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence has now become clear.
An article published in the journal Science, which draws together data from both surveys and studies, concludes that the “pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities and created additional challenges for women, especially those with children, struggling to maintain their research productivity”.
Such inequities were predicted in an opinion piece by radiation oncologist Reshma Jagso at the University of Michigan in March 2020, but “skeptical journal editors” overlooked the issue and did not publish it.
And, according to a worldwide survey of 20,000 PhD holders conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research and published as a working paper last month, the disparities between mothers and fathers are significant. The survey, which ran between May and July last year, illuminated substantial differences in terms of hours spent on research, child care, housework and other tasks.
For instance, while both mothers and fathers spent less time on research after the pandemic took hold, mothers spent 33 per cent less time researching than fathers. At the same time, the survey found that mothers were spending nearly three more hours a day on childcare, compared to fathers, who registered a change of just under two hours per day.
The number of hours spent on household duties, too, changed during the pandemic, with both mothers and fathers spending nearly an hour more than usual on such tasks.
In February of 2020, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) provided funding for COVID-19 research, and scientists were afforded just eight days to submit their proposals – a timeline some female researchers felt would disproportionately affect the number of female proposals.
Despite Canada not being in lockdown at the time, female academics accounted for only 29 per cent of the proposals, roughly 7 percentage points lower when “compared with previous comparable funding opportunities”.
Cara Tannenbaum, scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at CIHR, reflected on the disappointment felt at the time:
“As soon as we got the numbers we went, ‘Oh my goodness, we did something wrong,’” she said.
Two months later the agency offered a second round of COVID-19 funding, this time extending the deadline to 19 days and reducing paperwork requirements. The new strategy worked, with proposals written by women jumping to a healthier 39 per cent, Tannenbaum and her co-authors describe in their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The logic behind the increase in proposals by women is aptly expressed by Holly Witteman, a health researcher at Laval University.
“I looked at the 8-day deadline and I just thought, ‘There's no way,’” Witteman said, who has two children.
“I can't just cram in extra work by staying up late to write another grant.”
Witteman’s proposal was ultimately funded, which she attributes primarily to the deadline extension. However, the researcher is concerned about gender disparity repercussions flowing from the first round, in which the success rate was much higher for males than females (44 per cent versus 9 per cent).
“When you have funding, you get to do studies, and then you get to publish them, and then when you apply for more funding … you're in a much better position; it's this cumulative advantage snowball that just keeps rolling,” she said.
Robin Nelson, an anthropologist at Santa Clara University, asserts that the pandemic has made existing inequalities in many areas (including gender) “stark”. The anthropologist had her work hours cut by more than 50 per cent last year when her children were required to stay home.
“Some people are just simply working against more obstacles than other people,” she said.
In levelling the research ‘playing field’, so to speak, Nelson says “we are going to have to finally start questioning business as usual in the way that we administer grants … time to tenure, all of these policies.”
A meritorious idea to address this has been proffered by Robinson Fulweiler, an ecologist at Boston University. She believes funding agencies and universities should allow scientists the opportunity to to submit a COVID-19 impact statement, and that employers could be more proactive in providing the researchers with access to affordable child care.
The recommendations of Fulweiler and other scientist-mothers appeared in an opinion piece in PLOS Biology.
“Now is the time to act,” she and her co-authors write.
“Rather than rebuilding what we once knew, let us be the architects of a new world.”
Nelson concurs.
“I hope that COVID has … given us some space to actually think critically about what we expect of faculty and whether we can make space for faculty [staff] to have full lives that might involve disabilities, chronic illness, care taking of any sorts – just anything outside of work,” she said.
“Academe has really privileged people who can get other people to do all of that labor for them. And so we need to really start thinking about what does a sustainable academic environment with a healthy faculty look like and how can we make space for that without thinking that we're compromising rigor.”