Academic looks at pandemic's affect on parents of young children and women in academia

The COVID-19 pandemic has hurled quite the challenge at parents of young children and women in particular, says Alessandra Minnello, a social demographer who studies how families manage household and paid work. She has been working from home since her university closed on March 12, and has had the experience of many working parents. She must start working before daybreak to ensure that lessons she’s recording for students have minimal background noise – which is not possible when her two year old son is awake. Or, to work around his needs, she records at night.  

Many of her colleagues who want to meet in video chats have now met Minnello’s son. These personal experiences have made her more aware of the changes that COVID-19 has brought to parents work and daily lives, which she discusses in an article published on April 17 in the journal “Nature.”

“This means I have less time for writing scientific articles. Instead of working, my colleagues and I are aiming to make it through daily life. Of course, when compared with the drastic consequences of contracting COVID-19, this is a trifling matter. And we know that we are all lucky to have the jobs we do,” Minnello writes.

Minnello says that data on publication records in the next few years may show that parents who work in academia were disadvantaged, compared to those without children in 2020.

“Those data might also reveal the consequences for women. Care work is, in fact, unbalanced — even among highly educated couples. Women devote significantly more time to household work than do men,” writes Minnello. “When married mothers and fathers in the United States are compared, the former spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare. In the gender-egalitarian countries of northern Europe, women still do almost two-thirds of the unpaid work. Even among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners, women do most of the care work.”

She suggests that when both members of a heterosexual couple are at home, they may see gender inequality exacerbated. Minnello thinks one solution might be to count “this period of lockdown as care leave for those tending to any dependent family member.” She also emphasizes that this should be kept in mind when these are evaluated for career advancement. “This might be extremely helpful for families that are even more disadvantaged during this time — particularly those with single parents, who are more likely to be women,”