Sustained knowledge work and thinking time amongst academics: gender and working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a migration of workforces to work from home. A key issue for academics was the implications for the ability to carve out ‘thinking time’ to engage in what we term sustained knowledge work, the type of work essential for producing research. We administered an employee survey to academics from seven Australian and seven Canadian Universities, receiving over 3000 responses. We report on both quantitative and qualitative findings from the survey, with a particular emphasis on the latter. The two countries displayed broadly similar patterns in responses, but these patterns were gendered in specific ways. We distinguished between episodic and sustained knowledge work and found the shift of the location for sustained knowledge work from the workplace to the home affected academics unevenly, with disproportionate negative impacts on women. There are implications for all knowledge workers: while gendered, domestic norms continue to exist, the sustained knowledge work that is critical to career advancement can become especially problematic for women knowledge workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge work
• working from home
• remote working
• gender
• universities

Acknowledgement

The authors also wish to thank Alison Preston and Sean O’Brady, who were members of the research project team but not directly involved in this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This project (the COVID-19 Home-working of University Staff Survey, or CHUSS) was financially supported by a number of the universities whose staff were surveyed, and involved all the researchers shown in the author list plus the two listed in the acknowledgements section. Note that since the project was completed some researchers have moved institutions. Results for participating universities were provided to them but the anonymity of respondents, and of the funding universities, has been maintained. Funding universities had no influence over the final version of the paper or any draft.