Pandemic Imperils Promotions for Women in Academia

 Pandemic Imperils Promotions for Women in Academia

This pandemic has been extremely brutal for working mothers, especially those with jobs with little to no leverage. Experts are saying that it is even worse for mothers who are in "up-or-out" fields where workers face a single high-stakes promotion decision (i.e. tenure in academia). The pandemic has led to months or more of productivity lost due to additional child care responsibilities which falls more heavily on women. This can reverberate throughout their careers. This has been especially evident on some college campuses which tend to exhibit more more activism than other "up-or-out" workplaces.

At Northwestern, hundreds of female faculty members have been pushing the university to reduce the disruption of the pandemic but with little success since "[t]he present is unsustainable" according to Susan Pearson, a tenured Northwestern history professor. She states that, "parenthood was too often seen in academic settings 'as a personal choice' rather than as a societal obligation — 'like if you choose to live two hours away from work and you have a long commute, the university shouldn’t have to do anything about it.'"

Northwestern, like other universities, responded to the pandemic initially by pausing tenure decisions for junior faculty to give them an extra year to publish academic work to aid with earning the promotion. However, according to research, it is deemed an imperfect policy. According to a study, "men were substantially more likely to receive tenure at their first job after the university allowed an extension for new parents of either sex, while women were substantially less likely to receive tenure than they were before the policy change." An economist at the University of California, Davis and co-author of the paper, Jenna Stearns, states that the reason behind this finding is that men spend more of their time on research while women are spending more of their time managing more of their parental obligations. There is evidence that the pandemic is producing a similar effect, skewing more male with gender divides.

For example, Dr. Marion Suiseeya is currently writing a book that is critical to her tenure prospects. She estimates that she was two months away from completing the manuscript in March and was working about three or four hours a day on it. However, after the pandemic hit, she believes the book will now take her four months or more to complete due to only getting no more than two non-productive hours a day to work on it. Her daughter thinks she is working more than usual, but she's actually working quite a bit less. Delaying her book would just continue the stress it has put on her family, so she is trying to finish it by the original deadline although she is unsure it will be ready. She would like to have "additional child care subsidies and a more nuanced evaluation process with less weight on whether her book has been published" rather than an extension. Hopefully, a solution can be found to help these women keep their careers while helping with the additional stressful childcare.