The Virus Moved Female Faculty to the Brink. Will Universities Help?

At the same time, the country was reckoning with its history of racial injustice, placing an added burden on women of color in academia. They were faced not only with the pandemic’s fallout — which has disproportionately affected and killed Black and Latino Americans — but also the “emotional, physical and social ramifications” of police violence and unrest, said Michelle Cardel, a nutrition scientist at the University of Florida who has studied how the pandemic affects early-career women scientists. She pointed out that faculty of color often provide support and mentorship in such circumstances.

Some women faced harsher student evaluations during the outbreaks, too. Research shows that gender bias is rampant in end-of-term evaluations, with women and people of color more likely than men to get comments related to “their appearance or the tone of their voice — things that are less closely related to the ability to successfully teach,” said Jenna Stearns, an economist at the University of California, Davis.

Women are more likely to provide child care and step into caretaking roles than men. Because of that, experts have warned that evaluations might be more critical of women during lockdown.

Faced with these situations, universities have had mixed records in their attempts to alleviate the burdens of faculty and caretakers. Joya Misra, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who studies gender-related faculty inequities, said that at some institutions, “there’s not a thoughtful recognition of what is actually happening” to female faculty and how the pandemic has made existing problems more severe.

This summer, for example, Florida State University alarmed and upset employees when it announced that they were not allowed to care for children while working remotely. (The university has since amended its stance.) At the University of Michigan, unionized graduate instructors went on strike when the administration would not agree to a list of demands that included flexible subsidies for parents. It later established a temporary expansion of an existing child care subsidy.

But other universities have moved to address the issues more directly, instituting policies meant to help faculty achieve tenure and prevent women and caretakers from suffering short-term academic losses.