‘No less of a woman’: examining the (invisible) life of childfree women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academia has denounced how academic mothers’ research and teaching performance have been disproportionately disrupted compared to those of their male colleagues, given the generally unequal division of reproductive work. Gendered notions of motherhood remain central to conceptions of what women are, and motherhood is regularly portrayed as the main hindrance to academic women’s careers. However, little is known about the experiences of childfree women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews with childfree women in academia about how they navigated the transformations brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper argues that the perception of childfree women as the ideal worker and a gendered conceptualization of work-life balance have rendered childfree academic women’s hardships invisible. This article concludes that, contrary to the idea that childfree women academics were unencumbered during the COVID-19 pandemic, these women faced various struggles that significantly affected their emotional well-being and availability for work. The evidence underlines the importance of studying childfree women academics to disentangle the complexity of women’s experiences in neoliberal academia.

KEYWORDS:

• Childfree women
• neoliberal academia
• COVID-19 pandemic
• gender inequality

Introduction

In the context of neoliberal academia, scholarship has pointed to academic mothers being the group most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (hereafter, ‘the pandemic’) since their research hours were limited to a greater extent by an increase in care work and teaching demands (Bowyer et al., 2022; Breuning, Fattore, Ramos, & Scalera, 2021; Minello, Martucci, & Manzo, 2021). However, this sole focus on women with parenting responsibilities renders the experiences of childfree women academica invisible. This is unfortunate as, in countries such as Austria, Canada, Germany and the United States, the proportion of childfree women is higher among academics than in any other sector, and women scholars are more likely to remain childfree than their male colleagues (Berghammer, Buber-Ennser, & Prskawetz, 2016; Bomert & Leinfellner, 2017; Reuter, 2018).

This article seeks to help fill this knowledge gap by exploring how childfree women working in Portuguese academia navigated their professional and personal struggles amid the global health crisis. It aspires to do so by analysing in-depth interviews with women scholars who hold a Ph.D. degree and are affiliated with a Portuguese academic institution and who did not have any parenting responsibilities at the time of the pandemic.

Neoliberal academia is characterized by the metricization and marketization of academic production, the intensification and casualization of work, the expansion of auditing regimes, and fierce competitiveness. This has fostered a culture of long working hours and individualistic practices (Gill, 2010; Pereira, 2017). Against this background, childfree women are frequently identified as the academic ‘ideal worker’, unencumbered by caregiving demands outside their jobs (Acker, 1990; Gill, 2010), and therefore seen as privileged compared to academic mothers (Lynch, 2010). However, due to the centrality of motherhood in conceptions of what women do and what women are in our society (Gillespie, 2003), they are also regularly confronted with prescribed gendered discourses that portray them as deviating from the norm (Bonache, Carballo, Chas, & Delgado, 2022). Hence, this paper aims to delve into existing perceptions of childfree women, demonstrating the complexity of their experiences in academia.

Misconceptions and expectations about childfree women and the gendered conceptualization of work-life balance – both in academic institutions and in the scholarly literature – have silenced women in academia without parenting responsibilities, rendering their hardships invisible. Hence, this paper contributes to research on women’s experiences in neoliberal academia by deconstructing the idea of childlessness as an unproblematic advantage to their careers. This analysis adds to the existing literature about the pandemic’s impact on academic women by examining an understudied group.

Motherhood, care and work-life balance in academia: a framework for analysis

This article assesses how gendered structures and discourses shape childfree women’s performances and perceptions concerning their work-life opportunities and choices in neoliberal academia (Rosa, 2021; Turnbull, Graham, & Taket, 2018). Three core discussions underpin its analysis.

First, the normative social construction of motherhood is enmeshed in the normative social construction of gender itself (Connell, 1987). Being a mother conforms to a woman’s ‘correct’ performance of gender, and maternity is framed as the essence of a woman’s body and desires (Butler, 2008). The power of gendered relations in societal dynamics and the costs of not complying with them place a significant burden on childfree women.

Second, the careless nature of neoliberal academia portrays ‘care-free’ workers as the ideal profile for academic success (Lynch, 2010). Lynch, Ivancheva, O’Flynn, Keating, and O’Connor (2020) argue that in academia, normative assumptions increasingly disregard care, and thus ‘real’ academics prioritize their career over caring responsibilities. Against this background, childfree women scholars correspond to expectations of performativity in neoliberal academia as they are perceived as fully dedicated to work (Lynch, 2010).

According to Armenti (2004), young women researchers often receive messages from senior women in academia about the challenges of having childcare responsibilities while ensuring successful academic career development. In a similar vein, Reuter (2018, p. 103) refers to an unspoken rule implying that ‘serious, responsible [women] scholars do not have children’ because motherhood responsibilities might hinder their careers.

Therefore, women in academia face a double bind. On the one hand, they are expected to live up to the ‘ideal academic’ model by being exclusively devoted to their careers; on the other hand, they are expected to conform to gendered social norms that equate womanhood with motherhood (Ramsay & Letherby, 2006).

Third, the centrality of heteronormativity, cis-normativity, and the nuclear family in our society shapes the concept of work-life balance in organizations and academic scholarship (Acker, 1990; Averett, 2021), fostering an exclusionary logic by differentiating those who have a family and those who do not. Furthermore, this translates into policies and practices regarding work-life balance that equate ‘work’ with paid work and ‘life’ with childcare demands (Boiarintseva, Ezzedeen, & Wilkin, 2021). This narrow understanding that reduces the non-work aspects of individuals’ lives exclusively to the domestic realm understates childfree women’s non-caring responsibilities, needs, and interests (Wilkinson, Tomlinson, & Gardiner, 2018). Although we have witnessed an expansion in the definition of family in academic literature, as well as organizational practices and public policies embracing same-sex couples, unmarried and divorced parents, and adoptive and blended families, it still focuses on monogamous, dyadic, co-residential sexual relationships intrinsically entwined with childrearing (Wilkinson, 2020). The supremacy of this normative notion of the family compared with other intimate and caring relationships such as friendships, extended families, and others (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004) diminishes childfree women’s involvement in various caring networks.

Obstacles to the academic careers of women with and without children

In neoliberal academia, motherhood has been identified as one of the main obstacles to women academics’ career advancement. A culture of long work hours, intense competitiveness, and pressure for publication is not always readily compatible with childcare responsibilities (Bonache et al., 2022). Overall, academic mothers receive limited institutional support to accommodate work, family, and personal lives (Reuter, 2018). These work-intensive and ‘family-unfriendly’ cultures push many women either to drop their academic careers or to forgo motherhood (Mason, Wolfinger, & Goulden, 2013).

While the hindrances undergone by academic mothers can be fully acknowledged, the lack of studies concerning the experiences of childfree women scholars (Eren, 2020) risks reducing the adversities encountered by academic women to the burden of motherhood. This invisibility conceals serious problems intrinsic to neoliberal academia that do not relate only to motherhood, such as excessive workload, pressure to perform exceptionally and to meet students’ expectations, individualism, and competitiveness (Gill, 2010; Pereira, 2017), as well as gendered power dynamics within academia – for instance, the concentration of women in precarious positions and the uneven division of work and emotional labour among faculty (Crabtree & Shiel, 2018). Furthermore, the void in the literature regarding the academic endeavours of childless women obscures the extensive impact of precarity on women scholars’ professional and personal lives, including on their decision to become mothers (McKenzie, 2021).

Childfree women academics are trapped in a quagmire. They may be viewed as committed scholars, unencumbered by external demands, but they are also seen as ‘others’ in societies that naturalize motherhood to women (Ramsay & Letherby, 2006; Reuter, 2018; Thébaud & Taylor, 2021).

In the academic context, they are exposed to different demands than their colleagues who are parents. Childfree women scholars are likelier to be assigned to teach night courses than their counterparts with family responsibilities (Wilson, 2004). They are expected to have greater work availability, work longer and during undesirable hours, and take on additional assignments (Ramsay & Letherby, 2006). Their personal needs are generally undervalued, as non-work demands tend to be associated solely with childcare responsibilities (Giles & Oncescu, 2021).

Portuguese neoliberal academia, gender equality, and the pandemic

Following global trends and boosted by austerity measures implemented in 2011, Portuguese academia has been undergoing major transformations framed by a neoliberal culture of performance (Pereira, 2017). Although relatively ‘late’ compared to the anglophone context, during the last decade, Portugal’s academic landscape has incorporated the pressure for quantifiable outputs and the expansion of an auditing culture, resulting in the intensification of work, acute competition, and job casualization and heightening emotional distress among scholars (Pereira, 2017).

Concerning gender equality, Portuguese academia has certain specificities. In 2018, women represented 43.5% of all researchers in Portugal, above the European average (32.8%) (EC, 2021). This high percentage hides subtle gender inequality dynamics, however. In 2021, women accounted for just 25% of full professors at public higher education institutions (DGEEC, 2021). Gendered norms that associate women with care and domestic work are still dominant in Portugal (Amâncio & Santos, 2021), shaping gender inequality dynamics in Portuguese academia. Thus, women scholars tend to bear most of the less prestigious administrative work and ‘emotional labour’ linked to students’ pastoral care (Ferreira, Vieira, Lopes, & Santos, 2021).

There are no national statistics in Portugal about scholars’ parental status. This lack of data hints at how Portuguese academia understates the impact of parenthood on academic careers. However, certain features of Portuguese society and academia allow us to assume that the rate of childfree women in academia in Portugal is lower than in anglophone contexts (Reuter, 2018). First, traditional gender norms and familistic values that conflate women with motherhood are more prevalent in Portuguese society than in countries like the United Kingdom (Amâncio & Santos, 2021; Gato, Tasker, Shenkman, & Leal, 2022). Second, the formalization in Portuguese academia of regimes of intense auditing of individual performance took place only at the turn of the 21st century (Pereira, 2017); hence, the academic workload was previously less intense than it is now, allowing room to accommodate work and family demands. Lastly, skilled Portuguese women often delegates to housekeepers most domestic work as a strategy for reconciling family and work (Rosa, Lorga, & Lyonette, 2016). Furthermore, the exploratory study by Santiago et al. (2012) supports the former assumption by showing that most Portuguese women in academia have parenting responsibilities.¹

At its outbreak in the European spring of 2020, the pandemic remained fairly under control in Portugal, compared with other countries such as the UK or Italy. The government took a proactive approach, imposing various preventive and control measures, such as social distancing and full and partial lockdowns. These measures directly affected the faculties’ academic and personal lives (Silva et al., 2021).

Most academic institutions could not offer adequate support to their staff, raising stress and exhaustion levels among scholars and exacerbating existing dynamics of gender inequality (França et al., 2021). As in other countries, Portuguese scholars were overloaded with domestic work, which disrupted their work-life balance arrangements, with women being affected more than men (Ferreira et al., 2021). During the transition to remote classes, students were in greater need of attention, and women scholars reported performing more emotional work than men and facing a more significant increase in administrative workload than their male peers (Ferreira et al., 2021).

Methodology and data

Insights into the experiences of childfree women academics during the global health crisis were obtained from data collected from interviews conducted for the ‘SAGE19: Scientific and Academic Gender (in)equality during COVID-19’ project between January and March 2021.² The project’s main objective was to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender inequality in Portuguese academia; therefore, it focused on how scholars navigated the immediate changes to their professional and personal lives in the first year of the pandemic. Seventeen women affiliated with a Portuguese academic institution were interviewed for this research – seven of whom did not have parenting responsibilities. In-depth semi-structured interviews were a valuable research method to grasp their lived experiences through their ‘subjective’ understanding of how they navigated the pandemic as childfree women scholars (Hesse-Biber, 2013).

I acknowledge that the experiences of academic mothers and childfree women academics are qualitatively different (Bonache et al., 2022). Most of the literature on the pandemic’s impact on women scholars has, however, centred on academic mothers (Bowyer et al., 2022; Breuning et al., 2021; Minello et al., 2021). Therefore, this analysis chooses to focus exclusively on the accounts shared by the seven childfree women academics. The aim here is to understand these women’s experiences and to give centrality to their endeavours as scholars during the global health crisis. By asking how childfree women scholars dealt with academic and personal demands throughout the first year of the pandemic, this paper intends to contribute to deconstructing misconceptions about them and expand our view of their non-work demands and interests.

The study was approved by the ethical committee of my institution and is GDPR compliant. Participants’ names and institutional affiliations were anonymized, their confidentiality was ensured, and informed consent was obtained before beginning the interviews. Participants’ profiles are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Participant profiles.

Name	Age	Marital status	Position	Field of expertise	Type of contract	Nationality
Carolina	53	In a relationship	Associate professor	Economics	Permanent position	Portuguese
Maria	38	In a relationship	Associate researcher	Communication Science	Fixed-term contract	Portuguese
Adelaide	42	Single	Senior researcher	Biology	During 2020: fixed-term contract; at the time of the interview: unemployed	Portuguese
Natalia	45	Single	Assistant researcher	Social science	Fixed-term contract	Italian
Aurora	39	In a relationship	Assistant Researcher	Agronomy	Fixed-term contract	Spanish
Florbela	39	Single	Assistant professor and associate researcher	Science education	Permanent position	Portuguese
Brites	46	Single	Lecturer and assistant researcher	Informatics	Permanent position	Portuguese

The interviewees were recruited in various ways. First, an email invitation was sent to all research centres and higher education institutions in Portugal, providing a detailed explanation of the study and asking them to disseminate the invitation among their affiliated scholars. Next, a call for participants was posted on the project’s Facebook page. The interview script focused broadly on the experiences of academic women during the first year of the pandemic and their strategies to navigate their personal lives and academic demands. Questions covered the interviewees’ main obstacles and coping strategies concerning academic work, career perspectives, mental health, and work-life balance. Interviews lasted between 30 and 90 minutes and took place online, in compliance with the social distancing measures at the time. Each interview was conducted via Zoom, recorded, and transcribed. All transcribed interviews were uploaded into MAXQDA to organize the coding process guided by thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2014). The analysis followed a semi-inductive approach, as the coding, findings, and interpretations were derived from the transcripts. After familiarization with the data by reading and rereading the interview transcripts, initial codes were generated (e.g. motherhood, anxiety), leading to a search for possible themes (e.g. parental status, mental health). The last steps were reviewing themes and defining and naming the final themes (e.g. misconceptions, struggles, and cost of productivity).

Findings

Misconceptions and the normative family

The first theme to emerge from the analysis of the interviews with women without parenting responsibilities was misconceptions about childfree women. Participants described how they were repeatedly confronted with comments about how easy – and therefore convenient – the pandemic was for their careers. Colleagues assumed that because they did not have childrearing responsibilities, they would have the opportunity to boost their productivity. In many ways, their statements reflect previous research that has shown how the personal lives of childfree women scholars are disregarded as irrelevant (Cummins, 2005; Verniers, 2020). In this section, I outline the participants’ accounts of their discomfort and grievance with such comments.

Carolina, a 53-year-old professor of economics, is married to a Swedish man. She describes how discrimination and stereotypes are constantly present in her experience as a childfree woman academic.

I think not having children is equally penalizing (…). I felt more discriminated against in academia for not having a child than for being a woman (…). People think that because I don’t have a child, I had time [during the pandemic] to do an infinite number of work-related things (…).

Carolina’s account illustrates how childfree women scholars are perceived as being constantly available for work, regardless of other needs and interests they might have, a feeling that all interviewees shared. The disregarding of Carolina’s personal life because she does not have parenting responsibilities illustrates an indifference towards her non-working commitments and pursuits (Giles & Oncescu, 2021).

The normative concept of the family, in which it is only through the presence of a child that a couple becomes a family (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004), also shaped the way childfree women academics interacted with academic colleagues who were mothers. The scholarship has shown how childfree women are often excluded from workplace social interactions either because non-family-related topics are unwelcome or because they are constantly questioned about their desire for motherhood, or lack thereof (Turnbull et al., 2018; Wilkinson, 2020). Maria is a 38-year-old associate researcher in communication science. Her partner was an essential worker and was thus required to go to work in person every day, even during lockdowns. She describes the silent position she adopted during this period.

Many of my women colleagues who are parents were complaining about the domestic work overload while having to teach and carry on with their research activities. However, I don’t have kids, so I felt I could not say anything (…). It was hard to be alone the whole day (…) when people complained about their kids etc. I did not feel it was acceptable to say: “Look at me. I am alone day after day. I can’t go out, but I can’t work.” (…) I was in touch with many people but was effectively alone.

In some cases, some childfree women felt excluded by the intense discourse of academic mothers about the drudgery of responding to the demands of their family and working throughout the pandemic. Because Maria’s family hardship was related to the absence of her partner, she refrained from sharing her experiences of loneliness as a childfree woman with her colleagues who are mothers, as she felt it would be dismissed or devalued.

Like Utoft (2020), I do not imply that academic mothers’ assertions about their burden during the pandemic are not relevant or that they are unmerited; I simply point out that the hardships experienced throughout the global health crisis by childfree women academics have been undervalued. This lack of acknowledgement brings about challenges regarding how we analyse women’s experiences in academia. As Pereira (2021) argues, by centring our discussions around the way parenting responsibilities have affected the careers of women scholars during the pandemic, we firstly risk equating all women in academia with mothers. Secondly, we confine the need for a personal life to those with childrearing responsibilities.

Struggles

Interviewees described facing many problems in their personal lives during the pandemic that were not linked to parenting responsibilities, but which nevertheless affected their well-being and availability for work. Given the unprecedented nature of the situation, fear, frustration, and anxiety about an unpredictable future and the safety and well-being of loved ones were constant themes (Corbera, Anguelovski, Honey-Rosés, & Ruiz-Mallén, 2020). While governments implemented a variety of measures to protect the population’s physical health, little was done to safeguard mental health. Meanwhile, social isolation, uncertainty, and distress are widely known to trigger psychological unrest, despondency, and depression (Choi, Heilemann, Fauer, & Mead, 2020). This was the case for Carolina.

I believe this is important coming from a woman who does not have children, who lives in a wonderful place (…) and, since the pandemic outbreak, started to have panic attacks. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had to go on pills (…), something I had never done before. I don’t have any depressive tendencies, so from a mental health perspective, it [the pandemic] has been very difficult. (…) I wanted (…) to warn people that a person who did not lose their job, who has a wonderful life, who was not confined [to a small apartment] can also become very fragile in this situation we are living through.

In other cases, childfree women also had responsibilities to care for parents or older relatives – as Adelaide, a single 42-year-old senior researcher in biology, describes. During the pandemic, she moved to live with her father and mother, who had late-stage cancer.

My biggest concern during the pandemic was not to get infected and to avoid transmitting it to my mother. Thus, I was extremely careful and respected all the rules – I barely breathed. I wanted to assist my mother as much as possible, so she would not be alone for very long (…). I had to support her in going to the hospital and treatments (…), so I had to organize my schedule according to her needs.

Aurora, a 39-year-old Spanish assistant researcher in agronomy, also recounts her concerns about her family. Given the unknown nature of the situation, the first months of the pandemic triggered high levels of anxiety; she explains: ‘As a foreigner living away from my family, not being able to travel, not knowing if I was going to see my parents again when both of them were infected with COVID (…). I went through this period feeling tense and apprehensive’.

The conflation of personal demands with childcare undervalues other needs and caring responsibilities that women academics without parenting responsibilities might have, for instance, caring for elderly parents or other relatives (Cummins, 2005). In cases like Adelaide’s, childfree women’s personal life commitments include time for community responsibilities, as she further describes.

I do volunteer work with older adults, and there was a period in which I could not go there, and this worried me a lot because I knew they were already in a vulnerable situation. In fact, one of them died (…). Being unable to do my volunteer work and be with ‘my senior ladies’ disturbed me deeply.

Albertini and Kohli (2009) highlight both the invisibility and the importance of childfree adults’ involvement in community work. For the authors, this overlooked aspect of the childfree experience challenges the narrative that portrays childfree people as not contributing to society because they ‘choose’ not to have children. For Adelaide, the impossibility of keeping her commitments outside her job was not seen as an opportunity to ‘cash in’ by putting in extra hours towards publications but rather as a source of consternation and tension.

Furthermore, two interviewees stated that not having family nearby during the global health crisis was not an advantage but a source of emotional distress. One of them is Natalia, a 45-year-old single social science researcher from Italy, who narrates her fears as a woman living solo.

Every situation presents different challenges. I am not a typical academic woman who went crazy with their husbands and children, am I? I am unaffected by that, but at the same time, I had to deal with the absence of all this (…). I had to think that if anything happens to me, I am alone (…). I remember once having a fever [not COVID-19 related], and I was devastated, all by myself.

Lack of emotional support has already been identified as a hurdle for people living solo (Wilkinson et al., 2018). Due to enforced social distancing measures aimed at containing contamination levels, living alone ‘has become literal and absolute’, fostering an emotional maelstrom (Kamin, Perger, Debevec, & Tivadar, 2021, p. 203). For many women living solo, trying to cope with the adverse effects of the lack of embodied interaction (Kamin et al., 2021) and being separated from their support and safety networks was psychologically exhausting (Giles & Oncescu, 2021). As Natalia says, the work-life tensions of childfree academic women were intensely consuming. Thus, the assumption that it was professionally advantageous for childfree women not to have family around during the pandemic is erroneous and uncaring.

Lastly, childfree women scholars are also affected by the growing precarity in academia. In their struggle to gain a permanent contract (tenure), one interviewee described how she sacrificed her work-life balance to cope with the new working protocols enforced by the physical distancing restrictions.

Upon the pandemic outbreak, Adelaide was in the last six months of her precarious fixed-term contract. To conclude her research project in June 2020, according to schedule, given the limitations on accessing the lab, she had to work frantically during unsociable hours, as she states:

I was very concerned about concluding my project on time, so I worked exhaustively every time I could get access to the laboratory, many times in the evenings (…) now I am unemployed, and I don’t get replies for my (academic positions) applications.

Despite the adverse working circumstances, the precarious contractual conditions of some childfree women scholars pushed them to escalate their work pace to deliver their prescribed job. Despite succeeding in their assignments, these women were also caught by the cyclical nature of academia’s intermittent employment (Bosanquet, Mailey, Matthews, & Lodge, 2017). The expansion of precarious employment in academia emotionally affects scholars working on precarious fixed-term contracts and in many cases constrains their lives choices (McKenzie, 2022, p. 266).

The accounts above challenge the ideas of childfree women navigating the pandemic trouble-free and living in the perfect personal and work environment to skyrocket their performance. The interviewees reveal that even if they did not occupy the role of a mother, they still faced relevant adversities in their personal and professional lives that affected both their mental well-being and productivity during this unprecedented situation.

The personal cost of productivity

Like many other professionals, scholars have been expected to continue their regular work despite the upheaval in their personal and household routines and the social and professional disruption wrought by the pandemic. In some cases, the culture of individualism fostered by performative academia’s tyranny of productivity (Pereira, 2017) blurs a critical view of the situation to identify the real problem. By pointing to the supposedly intense productivity of childfree women as the primary cause of academic mothers’ career stagnation during and after the pandemic (Flaherty, 2020; Minello et al., 2021), the scholarship overlooks problems that are intrinsic to the logic of metrics and the auditing culture of the neoliberal academia.

When lockdowns were implemented, none of the interviewees had to rearrange their academic working routines as academic mothers had to due to the increased childcare responsibilities. However, this does not mean that they were untroubled by the transformations and uncertainties brought by the global health crisis or that their productivity was unaffected. Corbera et al. (2020, p. 193) state: ‘Even if the household conditions were more “favorable”, could someone be expected to conduct business-as-usual in the wake of a global pandemic and maintain the same pace of productivity and engagement with our job duties?’. This is what Carolina’s experiences teach us. As a childfree woman academic living with a supportive husband in a stable job, she could be deemed the ‘ideal pandemic worker’, referred to by Flaherty (2020) as an ‘unburdened academic’ whose productivity ought not to be affected. However, as she states: ‘because I had a serious mental health problem, I was neither more productive nor did I work more than I had before. In fact, I worked less’. Carolina’s case should not be seen as exceptional: even before the pandemic, the incidence of mental health problems among scholars was already extremely high, despite being invisible (Smith & Ulus, 2020).

Like Carolina’s, Aurora’s account points to how even childfree women scholars who were not overloaded by childcare responsibilities could often not respond to the work demands of careless academia (Lynch, 2010). She found it absurd that scholars were expected to effortlessly embody a sense of normality despite the pandemic.

[Academic] institutions (…) didn’t consider people’s mental health, that someone could not continue working when they are extremely nervous because of what is happening outside their houses, (…) because of what could happen to their families.

Two of the women interviewed acknowledged that their work rhythm had increased; however, they did not refer to this as an advantage. Florbela is 39 years old and lives alone. She is an assistant professor and associate researcher in science education. Due to her ‘privileged’ situation of not having caring responsibilities, the first lockdown was an unsettling period, as she felt she should be devoting all of her time to work.

For me, one of the biggest challenges was ‘reverse guilt’: I don’t have anything else to disturb me, to demand my attention; thus, I should be super, mega-productive … I felt this inner pressure a lot. (…) There were days when I worked 12, 13 hours a day. And I said: “Jesus, this is not sustainable!”

‘Academic guilt’ – the perception of failing to meet a scholarly obligation – haunted academics long before the pandemic (Walters, Ronnie, Jansen, & Kriger, 2021). The pressure to meet standards of excellence as measured by narrow indicators of productivity such as publications in top-ranked journals, as well as satisfying the requirements of external funding and providing immediate responses to student demands, turns academic careers into guilt traps (Gill, 2010; Pereira, 2017). Based on the assumption that they had no ‘distractions’ in their ‘perfect’ personal lives (Utoft, 2020; Walters et al., 2021), the academic guilt of some childfree women scholars was exacerbated during the pandemic for not being as productive as they were expected to be. Thus, they worked increasingly, hoping to correspond to the ‘ideal workers’ they were imagined to be.

Balancing work and personal life demands during the pandemic was not always easy for childfree women academics. Like Florbela, Brites recounts how the absence of companionship made it more difficult for her to detach from work, so she worked around the clock. As a 46-year-old, single, childfree woman academic holding lecturer and assistant researcher positions in informatics, she would repeatedly lose track of working hours, compromising her work-life balance.

If I had kids or other people around, I would have to follow different schedules, but as I live alone, I don’t follow any. Sometimes, I catch myself saying: ‘Wow, it’s 11 pm, and I haven’t had dinner yet’, (…) because I am focused, working, and I don’t feel hungry. Those who have families must prepare lunch at a specific time (…). I sometimes would embarrass myself by calling [workmates] at 10 pm (…) because my schedule was totally messed up.

Throughout the pandemic, many childfree women scholars were neither proud of their constant availability for work nor did they view the pandemic as an opportunity to boost their publications. In fact, even before the pandemic, childfree academics reported high dissatisfaction with their extended working hours (Jacobs & Winslow, 2004). Most of my interviewees felt uncomfortable about their long and unsuitable work schedules, as they realized they compromised their physical and mental well-being.

Conclusion

This article contributes to debates about the experiences of women academics during the pandemic by exploring how childfree women have navigated their professional and personal challenges amid the global health crisis.

Certain limitations of this paper must be acknowledged, which might enlighten further studies. Fieldwork was conducted during the first year of the pandemic; however, the global health crisis has unfolded in many distinct phases, posing different challenges to academic work. Therefore, my analysis embraces specific circumstances concerning how childfree women academics steered through the pandemic. In addition, the sample reflects the lack of diversity in Portuguese academia (Tavares, Cardoso, Carvalho, Sousa, & Santiago, 2014); thus, I could not interview either trans or black women academics. Recognizing that these cohorts tended to be more isolated even before the pandemic, studies focusing on their experiences are fundamental. Lastly, the study’s main focus was the immediate impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portuguese academia. Hence, I was not able to capture how the growing precarity and casualization of academic career affect(ed) the ability of women scholars to plan their futures, including motherhood choices vis-à-vis career, and how personal life intersects in all life stages, especially in the case of early-career researchers. Accordingly, more extensive work is needed to explore the impact of precarity on academics’ personal and professional aspirations during and after the pandemic context.

My findings, however, show that the hardships faced by childfree women academics throughout the global health crisis differ from those of mothers but deserve equal consideration – especially given the large number of childfree women in academia. Gendered discourses that conflate women and motherhood and notions of work-life balance that equate ‘life’ with ‘family’ and ‘family’ with ‘children’ have reduced academic women’s struggles during the pandemic to childcare responsibilities. Hence, childfree women academics felt marginalized for ‘deviating from the motherhood mandate’ (Reuter, 2018) and compelled to remain silent about their burdens.

The image of childfree women academics as ideal workers, unencumbered by parental responsibilities and remaining untroubled by any circumstance, pushed some childfree women to try to correspond to this expectation of productivity – a decision that was itself not free of cost. In some cases, they were unable to maintain clear boundaries between their work and non-work life, which affected their well-being. Childfree women scholars felt they were perceived as ideal, individualistic neoliberal workers who were able to view the global health crisis as an opportunity to boost their careers. However, some were unable to maintain their professional pace due to emotional struggles relating to their personal or global circumstances. This incapability should not be seen as an individual failure but rather illustrate how childfree women are not the idealized disembodied scholars.

Thus, the perception of childfree women academics as ideal workers leaves the toxic performative culture of academia untouched and conceals the gender power dynamics within academia that hamper women’s careers (see Crabtree & Shiel, 2018; Guarino & Borden, 2017). Furthermore, it reproduces the narrow conceptualization of work-life balance that reduces non-work life to childcare responsibilities, disregarding childfree academic women’s personal needs and interests. Therefore, I suggest a shift in analytical focus – from differences in productivity between academic mothers and childfree women academics to problems intrinsic to ‘careless’ performative academia, which has led to an expectation that scholars continue their regular work in spite of an unprecedented global pandemic.

Acknowledgments

The writing of this article benefitted immensely Maria do Mar Pereira’s generous sharing of her knowledge. I would like to thank her for bringing valuable insights to the discussions. Additionally, I am enormously grateful to Beatriz Padilla, who coordinate the ‘SAGE19: Scientific and Academic Gender (in) equality during Covid19’ project with me as well as our marvelous research team: Mara Alexandre, Filipa Godinho, Lígia Amancio and Ana Fernandes Alexandre. Lastly, I am extremely grateful to the generous peer reviewers for this journal who provided inspiring feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The present work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal under the scheme RESEARCH GENDER 4 COVID, grant 91

Notes on contributors

Thais França

Thais França, PhD, is currently an integrated researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology Institute of the Lisbon University Institute (Cies-Iscte). Her research expertise and interests focus on gender, migration, gender, social inequalities and post-colonial studies.

Notes

1. Despite a drop in the fertility rate in Portugal, in 2019, most Portuguese women holding a tertiary degree had at least one child (INE, 2019).

2. The project embraced a multi-methods approach, including a survey with 603 women and two mixed-gender focus groups approaching different aspects of scholars’ experiences during the pandemic. However, given the purpose of this article, only interviews with childfree women scholars are analysed.