‘In quicksand’: Female faculty talk pandemic’s impact on work, childcare stigma
With the pandemic forcing children to stay at home for online school, mothers in academia have had to juggle multiple responsibilities while attempting to stay focused on their careers. Unsplash
Disclaimer: The Chapman University faculty members whose names are not identified wish to remain anonymous due to concerns over the stigma associated with childcare and professional performance.
An email sits unfinished on her computer, the cursor flashing aimlessly as Marisa Cianciarulo leans over to help her six-year-old daughter with her remote kindergarten lessons. Sitting side-by-side in cream-colored upholstered chairs at their wooden dining table, the younger Cianciarulo is distracted from her online school, her ADHD kicking in. She wants to get away. She wants to draw. She wants to play a game with her mom.
Cianciarulo isn’t used to this. An associate dean of academic affairs at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law, she’s normally a teacher of adults — not children. To ensure her daughter’s focus, Cianciarulo has no choice but to stop her own virtual responsibilities to sound a word out for her or scramble to find a stray worksheet.
In the meantime, that email — a tangible remnant of her professional life — may often float in a void, waiting until Cianciarulo can put her children to bed for the night in order to finally turn her attention to the still-blinking cursor.
“We want to tell women all the time that they're moms and they're awesome and they're doing the best work and the best job you'll ever do,” Cianciarulo told The Panther as stray shouts of her children echoed through the phone. “(You have) no idea how many times people have told me that. And the truth of the matter is our society doesn't reflect that at all. Not in any way. It's simply lip service.”
“We want to tell women all the time that they’re moms and they’re awesome and they’re doing the best work and the best job you’ll ever do. (You have) no idea how many times people have told me that. And the truth of the matter is our society doesn’t reflect that at all. Not in any way. It’s simply lip service.”
As the pandemic has sent children of all ages home to learn over Zoom, mothers in academics have struggled under the weight of balancing day-to-day responsibilities with taking care of their kids. All of a sudden, some have become full-time caregivers, entertainers, chefs and teachers to their children while also balancing the demand of academia lecturing, advising or managing. That added responsibility could have dangerous consequences for the already-prevalent gender inequality within educational institutions.
“You kind of feel like you’re in quicksand,” said Emily Carman, a Dodge College of Film and Media Arts professor and mother to a 20-month-old daughter. “You’re just sinking, sinking, sinking.”
Carman is currently attempting to raise a newborn with her husband in the middle of a global pandemic while teaching three classes at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and serving as the school’s film studies program coordinator. It’s “frenzied,” she said, with no natural decompression time. She teaches and conducts meetings from the back of her house in a guest room-turned-office, hoping her daughter won’t bang on the door when she hears her mother’s voice.
According to a June 2020 study by researchers Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu, in the 10 weeks after the initial March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, female academics’ productivity in the United States dropped by 13% in comparison to that of male academics. Graphic by HARRY LADA, Art Director
Carman is hard-pressed to find time to prepare for classes, to grade assignments and to continue working on her upcoming book analyzing the 1961 film “The Misfits,” tentatively titled “A Misfit Cinema.”
“I have not written anything new since I’ve given birth, but the pandemic has made it impossible,” Carman said. “My goal went from getting my book prospectus and signing a new book contract to, ‘Can I even open up the document again for more than like five minutes?’”
A June 2020 study by Emory University and Harvard University researchers Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu found that in the 10 weeks after the initial March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, total research productivity in the United States increased by 35%. However, female academics’ productivity in terms of the amount of research papers produced dropped by 13% in comparison to that of male academics. Meanwhile, a study of women economists revealed a 12% decrease in preprints and registered reports produced in March 2020, followed by a 20% decrease in April 2020.
“Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” tweeted Elizabeth Hannon, the deputy editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in April 2020. “Never seen anything like it.”
One reason for the drop in research and scholarly activity is increased family responsibility, which in turn can be attributed to long-standing gender norms of mothers societally pinned as caretakers, multiple Chapman faculty members who are mothers told The Panther.
“In my household … the mom does a lot more of the childcare, taking over a lot of the housework,” said one anonymous Chapman faculty member. “It’s just been a very stressful, challenging year.”
Evaluators at universities judge whether faculty members are granted “tenure,” which increases pay for professors, based upon tangible factors such as a certain number of articles or books published per year in their scholarly field. A number of schools — such as Chapman University, said Provost Glenn Pfeiffer — offer extensions to the tenure process under extenuating circumstances like the pandemic.
Yet taking that extension, even if they eventually hit their marks in research and independent work, could have long-term repercussions on female faculty in terms of pay equality.
“The issue there is you’re going to have more women take (the extension), especially caregivers, because they need the time (during the pandemic),” said another Chapman faculty member and mother. “People are going to see on your resume it took you longer to get tenure than other people, and that plays against you as well.”
The faculty member explained the time it takes to receive tenure can inadvertently influence and increase the pay gap between men and women. So why don’t female faculty simply speak up about the struggle of balancing family life, teaching and research? There’s often a stigma associated with childcare, said a third anonymous mother and Chapman professor.
“There’s research that shows that evaluators are likely to be biased against women who pose that they have caregiving duties; caregiving is considered to be a weakness,” she said. “If I were now to say in my annual report, ‘I had a toddler at home full-time and therefore I got very little research done and that shouldn’t be held against me’ ... an evaluator could have all this implicit bias against me and that could work to my detriment.”
“There’s research that shows that evaluators are likely to be biased against women who pose that they have caregiving duties; caregiving is considered to be a weakness. If I were now to say in my annual report, ‘I had a toddler at home full-time and therefore I got very little research done and that shouldn’t be held against me’ ... an evaluator could have all this implicit bias against me and that could work to my detriment.”
This same professor told The Panther that Chapman in particular has few expressed protocols in place to address the potential issue of caregiver bias in tenure evaluation. She brought forth examples from other institutions, such as The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, issuing a letter from the provost to evaluators re-determining tenure expectations and the provost’s office at Boise State University explicitly outlining their 2020 evaluation process in light of COVID-19.
Pfeiffer told The Panther the university is always looking for implicit bias in evaluators, and he is aware of the gender disparity in faculty research. He mentioned Chapman’s Senate Executive Board is putting forth a task force of faculty to confront the issue of decreased scholarly work during the pandemic.
“It is absolutely wonderful to hear that the university is making its way to adopt mitigating measures like so many of its peers have already done,” the anonymous faculty member said in response to Pfeiffer’s comments.
Cianciarulo, despite having tenure herself, said it was important for institutions to understand and respect female faculty’s desires to delay the tenure process until the effects of the pandemic cease to work against them and not their male counterparts.
“You can't pretend that these differences don't exist — that these differences in perceptions of what's appropriate for moms versus what's appropriate for dads don’t exist,” Cianciarulo said. “I think there's a lot of pretending them away.”