Impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the productivity of academics who mother
Autor/in:
Kasymova, Salima; Place, Jean Marie S.; Billings, Deborah L.; Aldape, Jesus D.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: The aim of the study is to document how academics who mother have reorganized work and childcare since the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States, how those shifts have affected their academic productivity, and solutions proposed by academics living these experiences. We collected data via an online survey and, subsequently, by conducting qualitative interviews with a subsample of participants. From June to August 2020, 131 female-identified academics who mother were recruited via a Facebook group, Academic Mamas, and participated in our online survey. Twenty participants were then interviewed via phone or Zoom to explore more deeply the experiences of academics who mother. Results of our research suggest that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressure on academics who mother is immense. Analysis of the qualitative data revealed three major themes: (1) inability to meet institutional expectations; (2) juggling work and family life; and (3) proposed solutions. Our results suggest that significant efforts must be made by academic institutions to acknowledge and value the childcare responsibilities of academics who mother and to create solutions that fully address the challenges they face in meeting the academic expectations and requirements that largely remain unmodified despite the pandemic.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: We conducted a meta-synthesis review of existing literature on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) mentoring programs for women. Critical feminist theory (CFT) was used to understand how mentoring programs support retention and occupational advancement of women in traditionally male-dominated STEM fields. Four primary strands of CFT were explored: gender, oppression/patriarchy, social institutions, and systemic change. Traditional models of mentoring encompass varied approaches, including institutionally enforced programs, formal and informal programs, paired peer grouping, as well as face-to-face and online forums. However, low levels of retention and self-stated lack of professional satisfaction for women in STEM fields continue to plague those professions. This study reviews the literature on mentoring programs that have been implemented to support women in STEM, thus adding to the epistemology of mentoring women in STEM through feminist discourse.
Schlagwörter:Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen; Ingenieurwissenschaft; literature review; Mentoring; Meta-Analyse; meta-analysis; MINT; Naturwissenschaften; STEM
Mentoring as affective governmentality: Shame, (un)happiness, and the (re)production of masculine leadership
Autor/in:
Sandager, Jette
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: This article contributes to current discussions on the effectiveness of mentoring as a gender equality tool, but also focuses on the emotions and bodily (dis)comforts mentoring produces in addition to linguistic discourses, thus offering a novel take on how the tool operates. Drawing on a case study of a Danish mentoring program aimed at establishing the organizational space of leadership as more gender equal, the article demonstrates how, in producing shame and (un)happiness, mentoring (re)produces leadership as an organizational space dominated by masculine norms and work practices. The findings of the article support literature arguing that mentoring is an ineffective gender equality tool. However, the article does not entirely discard mentoring for this purpose, instead suggesting that scholars and practitioners look to literature on queered forms of mentoring for inspiration on how to use mentoring as a tool that carries the potential of truly promoting gender equality.
Equalities in freefall? Ontological insecurity and the long‐term impact of COVID‐19 in the academy
Autor/in:
Wright, Katharine A.M.; Haastrup, Toni; Guerrina, Roberta
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), 28 (2021) S1, S 163–167
Inhalt: This intervention focuses on the impact of the global crisis resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic on existing racialized and gendered inequalities within the academy and in particular our discipline of Politics and International Relations. We argue that responses to recent crises within the academy have exacerbated ontological insecurity among minoritized groups, including women. When coupled with increased caring responsibilities, the current crises call into question who can be creative and innovative, necessary conditions for knowledge production. While university managers seek to reassure university staff of the temporary nature of COVID‐19 interventions, we argue that the possibilities for progressive leaps at a later state of institutional regeneration is unlikely when efforts to address structural inequalities are sidelined and crisis responses are undertaken which run counter to such work.
Schlagwörter:academia; COVID-19; Gender; gender inequality; Geschlechterungleichheit; Hochschule; race; Universität
Researching Gender Inequalities in Academic Labour during the COVID‐19 Pandemic: Avoiding Common Problems and Asking Different Questions
Autor/in:
Pereira, Maria do Mar
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolds, a growing body of international literature is analysing the effects of the pandemic on academic labour and, specifically, on gender inequalities in academia. In that literature, much attention has been devoted to comparing the unequal impacts of COVID‐19 on the research activities of women and men, with studies demonstrating that women's research productivity has been disproportionately disrupted, in ways that are likely to have detrimental effects in the short‐ and long‐term. In this paper, I discuss that emerging literature on gender inequalities in pandemic academic productivity. I reflect on the questions asked, the issues centred and the assumptions made within this literature, devoting particular attention to how authors conceptualise academic labour and productivity, on the one hand, and gender, on the other. I show that this literature makes major contributions to exposing old and new gender inequalities in academia, but argue that it also risks reproducing some problematic assumptions about gender and about academic work. Discussing those assumptions and their effects, I identify some important questions for us to consider as we expand this literature and deepen our understanding of the complex gendered effects of COVID‐19 on academic labour.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), 28 (2021) S1, S 39–57
Inhalt: In this article, as have many Black women scholars in the past, we again call for collective action against anti‐blackness and White supremacy in the academy. Drawing from black feminist theory, we discuss the long history of Black women academics' activism against anti‐black racism and introduce the current movement: Black Lives Matter (BLM). Although BLM is often construed as resisting anti‐black violence outside the academy, it is also relevant for within the academy wherein anti‐blackness is likely to be manifested as disdain, disregard, and disgust for Black faculty and students. We discuss some of the ways in which anti‐blackness and liberal White supremacy are manifested in the lives of Black faculty and students, and propose that non‐Black allies have key roles to play in resisting them. Like second‐hand cigarette smoke that harms everyone in proximity, anti‐blackness and White supremacy harm us all, and a shared movement is needed to dismantle them.
Schlagwörter:academia; black feminism; black women; Hochschule; racism; Rassismus; Schwarze Frauen; Schwarzer Feminismus; white supremacy
Twice a ‘housewife:’ On academic precarity, ‘hysterical’ women, faculty mental health, and service as gendered care work for the ‘university family’ in pandemic times
Autor/in:
Docka‐Filipek, Danielle; Stone, Lindsey B.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: Extensive research has explained women's pandemic-related workforce exodus as driven by the presumed pressures of gender disparate private, domestic burdens. The impact of gender asymmetries in academic labor on faculty well-being is less understood. We examined the effects of job-related factors on faculty mental health, a critical measure of precarity during the initial Spring 2020 “lockdown” and transition to remote work. Faculty (n = 345) were recruited via social media to participate in a survey on their work/life pandemic experiences. Women were over-represented in our sample, yet respondents at both the highest and the most tenuous ranks were underrepresented. Gender, teaching load, having dependents, and greater financial concerns were associated with higher depression and anxiety. Critically, women's heightened mental health risk was not explained by the other predictors. Results indicate women faculty's well-being and career advancement are threatened by disparate, obscured service burdens both within the academy and at home during the pandemic.
“How did they protect you?” The lived experience of race and gender in the post‐colonial English university
Autor/in:
Salmon, Udeni
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: With this article, I seek to contribute to understandings of how racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through organizational processes. Using an autoethnographic method, I seek to demonstrate the workings of Mill's Racial Contract Theory and Ahmed's concepts of raced and gendered encounters through the implementation of a university diversity initiative: the Race Equality Charter. My findings demonstrate how the “doing” of diversity work results “undoing” the non-white diversity worker, as their lived experiences catastrophically diverge from the sunny promise of the diversity project. Furthermore, the Race Equality Charter's is revealed that the Charter is a factual, rather than normative type of contract, which enshrines a socio-political reality in which colonialism continues to shape white over non-white domination. Scholars and activists have long been naming the secret weapons of white supremacy in order to expose how anti-racist practice is co-opted by institutions. In this article, I theorize my lived experience to expose how policy and organizational processes fail to protect me, a non-white woman early career academic. I conclude that the Race Equality Charter, far from being a tool of social justice, enforces raced and gendered privileges in academic settings.
Gendered workload allocation in universities: A feminist analysis of practices and possibilities in a European University
Autor/in:
Steinþórsdóttir, Finnborg S.; Carmichael, Fiona; Taylor, Scott
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: The negotiated allocation of teaching and institutional service workload in universities is a key determinant of the quantity and quality of all work for academic staff. There is abundant quantitative evidence that women and men experience differential outcomes from faculty, school, or departmental workload allocation processes and convincing theoretical explanations as to why this happens. We add to this knowledge through feminist analysis of a mixed methods case study of an academic unit in a European University, focusing on gendered dynamics in the workload allocation processes there. Our analysis follows the “sweaty concept” methodology proposed by Sara Ahmed as a means of developing feminist theory that is founded on embodied experiences of discomfort in worlds that are not welcoming. The concept we develop through this is “inequitable modeling”; it suggests that while workload allocation processes are understood by model designers as a managerial tool to enable transparency and fairness (forms of procedural equity), the managed, especially women, experience them as opaque and unfair (forms of lived inequity). We conclude by questioning the principles and outcomes of such tools in achieving gender equity, and then describe how a feminist approach to workload modeling and allocation might be implemented.
Perceptions of Gendered‐Challenges in Academia: How Women Academics See Gender Hierarches as Barriers to Achievement
Autor/in:
Eslen-Ziya, Hande; Yildirim, Tevfik Murat
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizational settings as well as everyday interactions all play a major role not only in women's participation within academia, but also how they perceive their future in academic institutions. This research note, through an original survey with over 200 academics, attempts to study the latter assumption by looking at women academics’ perceptions of their work life, their challenges, as well as aspirations. Our results show that, those perceiving strong hierarchy in the realm of work are significantly more likely to believe that being woman in academia harms their job prospects. We also show that, not only were they pessimistic about the challenges facing them at the moment, but they were also more sceptical about women's potential in overcoming such challenges in the future.