We recently wrote about the unfair gender roles and emotional labor women take on in the household that’s been reinforced by the quarantine. To give a quick recap: Maintaining the household has long been seen as a stereotypical feminine role, with only the household chores that involve going out of the house or doing hard, physical labor being seen as the more masculine ones. Now that everyone is stuck at home, women have been bearing the brunt of household chores.
If you need to know exactly how this disproportionate division of labor can impact women and their careers, here’s sobering news from The Washington Post’s The Lily: According to many editors of academic journals around the world, women have been submitting far less papers while men have been submitting more during this time.
To prove this, astrophysics researcher Andy Casey analyzed data from “astrophysics ‘preprint servers,’ where academics typically post early versions of their papers,” comparing “data from January to April in 2020 to the same time period in previous years.” She found that there was “perhaps up to 50 percent more productivity loss among women.”
Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month. Never seen anything like it.
— Elizabeth Hannon (@El_Dritch) April 18, 2020
Deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Elizabeth Hannon also tweeted that there’s been a “negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month.” On the flipside, she noted in the replies that there were “plenty of submissions” from men.
Meanwhile, papers that have been seeing the same amount of submissions from women have been seeing a surge in male contributors. The Lily quotes David Samuels, who co-edits the academic journal Comparative Political Studies that publishes 14 times a year, who says he “received the same number of submissions from women this year and last year, the number of submissions from men has increased more than 50 percent.”
Of course, as The Lily notes, this isn’t true for all journals—some have kept a static gender ratio of submissions. But it’s happening to enough journals and academic fields to at least warrant concern.
Writing about this unfortunate trend, Fast Company notes, “the dip is attributed to the quadruple labor of childcare, housework, homeschooling, and professional duties that women are currently shouldering.” It then quotes statistician Alessandra Minello, who believes that it’s already inherently hard to balance childcare with a career in academia. “Academic work—in which career advancement is based on the number and quality of a person’s scientific publications, and their ability to obtain funding for research projects—is basically incompatible with tending to children,” she says.
Fast Company also notes that studies have shown how maternity and paternity leaves in academia tend to systematically favor men over women. “In a study of 20 years’ of economics departments, the policies ‘substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates.’”
Featured photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
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Emotional labor during the pandemic and how women are (still) taking the brunt of it
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