“While the global crisis has increased demand for research, such opportunities have created inequalities and distortion in the scientific community,” write the authors of a recent Social Science Research Network (SSRN) study that examines the gendered impact of COVID-19 in academia. The study finds that COVID-19 has disproportionately penalized the scientific productivity of female academics.

The authors analyzed metadata on manuscript submissions and peer reviews for Elsevier journals from February to May in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They found that the total manuscript submission rate increased 58 percent during the “COVID-19 period” of February to May 2020. However, these gains were not equally realized—women submitted proportionally fewer manuscripts and were less involved in the peer review process than men.

The authors also analyzed year-to-year changes in productivity for individual academics. Although academic productivity increased overall during the COVID-19 period studied, men’s productivity increased significantly more than women’s. The authors point to women’s increased caregiving responsibilities during COVID-19 as a likely cause of this discrepancy. Before the pandemic, women were already performing 75 percent of unpaid caregiving work worldwide. Demand for this work has “intensified exponentially” in the wake of COVID-19 due to school closures and the increased needs of sick and elderly family members. As women struggle to meet the demands of both their personal and professional lives, the pandemic is creating a dangerous dichotomy: as women’s unpaid work is skyrocketing, their paid work is plummeting.

The negative effects of the pandemic on women’s paid work are not limited to academia. Another study, published in Feminist Frontiers, found gendered differences in the impact of the pandemic on work dynamics within families. Using individual-level data from the US Current Population Survey (CPS), the researchers examined the period just before the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States through its first peak. By April, when most states had closed schools and implemented stay at home orders, parents’ work hours had changed significantly. Mothers (regardless of their children’s ages) had reduced their work hours by an average of one-and-a-half to two hours per week, contrasted with very little, if any, change in fathers’ work hours. Overall, mothers reduced their work four to five times more than fathers, increasing the gender gap in working hours by 20-50 percent. These findings remained consistent even when they limited their sample to families where both parents had the ability to telecommute.

These studies’ findings have long-lasting implications for working women worldwide. If the pandemic is hampering women’s paid work, while allowing men to maintain or even increase their work capacity, men will likely have an advantage in future merit-based promotions and opportunities (such as tenure). This could increase the gender wage gap and set back women’s progress in the workforce for years to come.

Negative outcomes are already beginning to materialize. In September 2020, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce—four times the number of men. This reduced the proportion of women in the U.S. workforce to its lowest level since 1988. In order to reverse this trend, women must be included in COVID-19 response efforts, both as active decision-makers and as a distinct population that is being severely impacted by the pandemic.

Read more:

• The unique impact of COVID-19 on women and girls.
• COVID-19 is exacerbating pre-existing racial and gender inequities.
• The importance of gender parity in the workplace.
• How can we value unpaid caregiving and care work?