The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionally impacted on the publication rate and research activity of women scientists who are also parents or caregivers.
As publication output is crucial to secure research funding and for career advancement in STEM, this crisis may have long-term impacts on women’s careers and further widen the gender gap in STEM. Leaders and decision-makers in STEM must take immediate action and implement solutions to prevent the amplification of the inequalities and obstacles that undermine women’s success in STEM careers. Lessons learned from this crisis should be used as a stepping stone to create systemic change and for rebuilding the work culture in STEM fields, academia in particular.
The recommendations bellow are targeted at lab heads and leaders/administrators of research institutions (including universities), funding agencies and publishers. Other recommendations, many of which we have included and/or expanded here, have been made by others (see references). We highlight the recommendations published by 500 Women Scientists and Fulweiner et al.
HOW CAN I SUPPORT EMPLOYEES WITH CAREGIVING RESPONSIBILITIES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC?
Provide financial aid and contract extensions
Research institutions can support parents and caregivers by providing contract extensions and funding to ensure the continuity of their research activity. Financial aid for childcare support should be offered, including for tutors or babysitters when schools and daycare services are closed due to social distancing restrictions. Grants can also be allocated to hire technicians to continue the research/field work of parents or caregivers who need to work from home to provide care. Funding agencies can provide grant extensions for parents and caregivers and allocate part of their funding to research grants and fellowships directed specifically at mothers–who faced disadvantages even before the pandemic–giving priority to single mothers.
Provide childcare services located in situ
As mothers are traditionally the primary caregiver, childcare availability and affordability is essential to ensure that women return and stay in the workforce. Daycare centres are generally lacking or may be unaffordable for low-medium income families and single parents. The COVID-19 crisis has compounded this situation by causing the temporary or permanent closure of many of such childcare facilities. Research institutions should provide in situ daycare services to all their students and staff, including those on temporary contracts, such as postdocs. Institutions which already have in situ daycare centres should reopen them as soon as possible following COVID-19 safety guidelines and offer financial aid for alternative childcare support while the in-situ services remain closed. A room for children should also be available in case parents need to take their children to work.
Establish a flexible work environment
During the pandemic, parents working from home have to work full-time while homeschooling and caring for their children, and this burden falls mostly on mothers. Leaders of research institutions and principal investigators (PIs) cannot expect the work productivity of their employees with caregiving responsibilities to remain the same during these challenging times. Research institutions should implement policies and encourage PIs to extend deadlines, adjust productivity goals and performance evaluation criteria, and allow flexible schedules and remote working, including after the COVID-19 pandemic. PIs should keep an open line of communication with their employees and readjust these accommodations whenever necessary. Finally, PIs should also be flexible with meeting schedules, record meetings for employees that cannot attend due to caregiving responsibilities, allow parents to bring children to meetings and be understanding when unexpected interruptions occur.
Promote inclusion of parents and caregivers
Parents, and especially mothers, report feeling the need to “hide” parenthood for fear of receiving career penalties or being excluded from projects or other career opportunities. As parents and caregivers have to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, this risk of exclusion is magnified. Research institutions need to normalise caregiving and ensure that parents and caregivers are not stigmatised or excluded from career advancement opportunities during the pandemic and beyond. Boundaries between personal time and work time should be established, breaks and time off should be encouraged, and flexible/family-friendly work policies should be openly supported for both mothers and fathers. Institutions can also establish networking groups where parents, in particular mothers, could find relatable role models and create a support network. PIs should ensure that parents and caregivers working from home are kept informed of projects, meetings and networking events. Virtual meetings should continue during and after the pandemic, and a new form of mixed in person/virtual meetings, conferences and networking events should become the new normal post-pandemic.
Offer ‘opt-out’ tenure clock extensions
As with other family-friendly policies such as part-time working, tenure clock stops can lead to long-term career and salary penalties and increase gender inequalities, since women are more likely to use them. Most parents, but especially fathers, do not use tenure clock extensions because of the stigma and career consequences associated with these policies. Instead of ‘opt-in’ tenure clock extensions, research institutions can offer automatic ‘opt-out’ tenure extensions for the pandemic (and for parental leave) to encourage both mothers and fathers to benefit from this policy. In addition, administrators should provide clear guidelines to tenure evaluators in order to eliminate promotion penalties and unconscious bias during tenure evaluations. It is also important that outcomes for promotions and tenure evaluations are routinely monitored by gender, ethnicity, illness/disability, and family/caregiving situation to ensure that all employees are treated fairly. Solutions should also be created to eliminate salary penalties for tenure stop-clock users, such as adjusting the salary upon tenure retroactively and include the “missing” time.
Reduce the administrative and teaching burden
During the pandemic, parents and caregivers–and mothers in particular–have significantly less time to devote to work than scientists without caregiving responsibilities. To minimise these inequalities, funding agencies can reduce the bureaucratic burden associated with fellowship and research grant submissions and activity reports, and simplify the application procedures. Research institutions can also simplify bureaucratic procedures, reduce the number of administrative meetings, and lessen the teaching burden of parents and caregivers, for example by providing no-cost teaching releases (i.e. without impacting on remuneration), so they can devote their time to research. Administrators must ensure that employees using these policies will not be penalised in performance or tenure evaluations.
Ask for feedback and model behaviour
Research institutions should conduct anonymous surveys and ask employees for feedback regularly to identify their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic and re-access policies accordingly. Administrators and leaders must be vocal and openly promote policies to support parents and caregivers, such as parental leave and flexible/remote work, as this will normalise caregiving and encourage employees to use these policies. Initiatives to promote gender equality should remain a priority–mothers have been disproportionally affected by this crisis and are more vulnerable to suffer long-term career consequences or leave the STEM workforce, in particular women of colour and from other underrepresented groups. Unconscious bias training for employees should be provided and leaders should speak out against these biases. Employees who are involved in running parents networking groups or other diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives should be compensated, and such work should be considered in performance or tenure evaluations.
Change the academic system
Academic success depends nearly entirely on publication output, as research grant submissions and tenure/job evaluations are mostly based on the impact and number of peer-reviewed publications. Research shows that manuscript submissions by women to preprint servers was significantly reduced during the first months of the pandemic, when compared to their male counterparts. To prevent long-term career consequences, deadlines for performance and grant evaluations should not only be extended, but the impacts of the pandemic should also be considered in these evaluations. Evaluation criteria should be redefined to include other metrics other than publication output. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, journals can fast-track submissions by women by prioritising them in the peer-review process, and also extend deadlines for submitting manuscript revisions. Further efforts to reduce gender bias in the peer-review process could be achieved by recruiting more women to editorial boards and editor-in-chief positions and inviting women to write reviews, as described elsewhere. In the long-term, research institutions should work together to scrape the “publish or perish” culture.
Be understanding
Social isolation, lack of sleep, physical and emotional exhaustion, fears for own and others health, and economic uncertainties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have disproportionately impacted on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of mothers, with unknown long-term consequences. Physical and emotional burnout affect work productivity, and research institutions, funding agencies and PIs must understand that this is not business as usual. Empathy is necessary and urgent. Motherhood is not a weakness, in fact, research shows that mothers are more productive and on average work the same ‘office-hours’ as fathers. To retain such valuable and talented employees, research institutions need to prioritise the mental health of mothers (and also other employees) and accommodate to their needs during this crisis, which is likely to continue for another year.
References:
Rebuilding the Academy: Strategies for Supporting Academic Mothers during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic and Beyond. Fulweiler et al., 2020, Preprints
Preventing a Secondary Epidemic and Lost Early Career Scientists. Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Women with Children. Cardel et al. 2020. Annals ATS
Recommendations to Minimize Career Penalties for Parents in STEM fields during the COVID-19 Pandemic. 500 Women Scientists, 2020.
Measures to Support Faculty During COVID-19. Mickey et al, 2020. Inside Higher ED.
The Career Cost of COVID-19 to Female Researchers, and How Science Should Respond. Virginia Gewen. 2020, Nature Careers.
Effective Policies and Programs for Retention and Advancement of Women in Academia. UC Hastings College of the Law, 2013, Center for WorkLife Law.
Opinion: In the Wake of COVID-19, Academia Needs New Solutions to Ensure Gender Equity. Malisch, J. L., 2020, PNAS
The Pandemic and the Academic Mothers: Present Hardships and Future Perspectives. Minello A. et al., 2020, European Societies.
Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientists. Myers K. R.et al., 2020, Nature Human Behaviour.
The “gender gap” in Authorship of Academic Medical Literature—a 35-year Perspective. Jagsi et al., 2006. New England Journal of Medicine.
Child Care and Child Care Policy: Existing Policies, Their Effects, and Reforms. Hotz V. J. & Wiswall M.,2019, AAPSS.
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Minding the Care Gap: Daycare Usage and the Negotiation of Work, Family and Gender Among Swedish Parents. Grönlund A. & Öun I., 2020,Soc. Indic. Res.
The Flexibility Stigma: Work Devotion vs. Family Devotion. Blair-Joy M & Berdahl J, 2013, Journal of social issues
Signaling Parenthood: Managing the Motherhood Penalty and Fatherhood Premium in the U.S. Service Sector. Luhr S., 2020, Gender & Society.
Flexible Work, Flexible Penalties: The Effect of Gender, Childcare, and Type of Request on the Flexibility Bias. Munsch C., 2016, Social Forces.
Motherhood in the Workplace: A Sociological Exploration into the Negative Performance Standards and Evaluations of Full-Time Working Mothers. Corinaldi M., 2019, Philologia.
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Gender Differences in Time Spent on Parenting and Domestic Responsibilities by High-Achieving Young Physician-Researchers. Jolly S. et al., 2014. Annals of Internal Medicine.
Gender Matters: A Call to Commission More Women Writers. Conley, D., Stadmark, J. 2012, Nature.