Gender and structural change in corona times: The Covid-19 gender impact in Academia and Research

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic, along with the successive lock-down periods, has nakedly shown our vulnerability, our need of caring each other, and the importance of sustaining life beyond production. It has also brought into the surface several gender inequalities that were not so apparently visible before, having the crisis a substantive gendered impact that reflects in many aspects of life. It has also brought in, in a quite more evident way than before, the need for a sustainable life that should be also considered in any productive activity, and the crisis of care that feminists have been problematising already for some decades now. Essential care work – massively performed by women- has proven to be highly important and necessary, although not compatible with regular gender-blind working standards and arrangements, which could not be maintained during lockdowns. All this results in a differential impact for women, who have spent more time and energy than men in domestic and care work, home schooling, and dealing with the impact of emotional and mental health, as some evidence has already systematically shown. Higher Education institutions are not an exception, nor the academic and research realm where there already some evidence, such as the decrease of as much as 30% less submissions by women to academic journals during the first wave lockdown during the pandemic. Moreover, analysing this pandemic with a gender lens more thoroughly help us to show the structural and systemic nature of gender inequalities, and this is what this panel aims at, concretely in Higher Education Institutions. Under the auspice of two gender structural change Horizon 2020 European projects, GEARING ROLES and SUPERA, several universities has undergone several diagnoses and measures regarding working conditions during lock-downs, work-life balance, reconciliation and co-responsibility, psychological impact, academic time usage and academic performance and production. These studies are conclusive on a general idea that female academics have worse academic working conditions than their male counterparts, and thus they are most severely affected by Covid-19 crisis. The panel analyses these empirical data highlighting the structural inequalities that are on the base of that general worse distress that affects academic careers, and how to deal with and mitigate them within a structural change framework.

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The psychological impact of the first lockdown on the scientific productivity in the University of Cagliari.	View Paper Details