The pandemic and the academic mothers: present hardships and future perspectives

ABSTRACT

Gender differences in academia are well-known. Women publish less, achieve higher positions less frequently, and have more interrupted careers. Mothers, more than fathers or childless men and women, suffer these disadvantages. Women academics have to deal with the work-family conflict, the participation in both work and family roles are incompatibly demanding. The closure of childcare services and the impossibility to benefit from informal care (mainly via grandparents) made the pandemic a potential accelerator of these drawbacks for academic mothers. Academic work is basically incompatible with the everyday care of children. Analyzing in-depth interviews, in this article we show how mothers of young children had to reorganize their job priorities during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Moreover, we describe the perceived effects of the pandemic on their future career. We showed that the pandemic changed the priorities of academic mothers in a direction that is unfavorable to their careers: mothers devoted most of their time to teaching duties and stopped research. Moreover, they felt an increased gap in their relative competitiveness with male and childless colleagues.

KEYWORDS:

• Mothers
• academy
• gender
• teaching
• research
• competitiveness

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In Italy each credit of teaching corresponds to 6/12 hours in class.

2 It refers to a qualification that is needed to become Professor in Italy. Publications and the career are evaluated by a national committee, to succeed researchers must exceed national level thresholds. https://www.anvur.it/en/activities/asn/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alessandra Minello

Alessandra Minello is Assistant Professor of Demography at the University of Florence. Her academic research focuses on: gender, fertility intentions, historical demography, work and education. She collaborates with the EU-FER (Economic Uncertainty and Fertility in Europe) project. She teaches Historical Demography and Demography & Tourism at the University of Florence.

Sara Martucci

Sara Martucci is an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Mercy College, New York. Her research has typically focused on gentrification and urban change but she is currently researching the gendered division of labor in the home during the Covid-19 lockdown. She has also received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to study and improve equity and inclusion at Mercy College.

Lidia K. C. Manzo

Lidia K. C. Manzo has been recently awarded with the Marie Sklodowska Curie European Individual Fellowship 2020–2022 to develop the project CITY-OF-CARE at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Milan University. She is interested in the application of ethnography and participatory methods in critical urban cultural studies to reinforce our knowledge of how discrimination, segregation and hegemony work spatially. She teaches Urban and Environmental Sociology and General Sociology at the University of Milan.