The unequal impact of parenthood in academia

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Abstract

Parenthood causes an unequal impact to the productivity of women in academia, taking 5 years for them to catch up to men.

Abstract

Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.

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Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students.

Corinne Moss-Racusin, John Dovidio, Victoria Brescoll … (2012)

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student-who was randomly assigned either a male or female name-for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants' preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

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COVID‐19 and the Gender Gap in Work Hours

Caitlyn Collins, Liana Christin Landivar, Leah Ruppanner … (2020)

School and daycare closures due to the COVID‐19 pandemic have increased caregiving responsibilities for working parents. As a result, many have changed their work hours to meet these growing demands. In this study, we use panel data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to examine changes in mothers’ and fathers’ work hours from February through April, 2020, the period of time prior to the widespread COVID‐19 outbreak in the U.S. and through its first peak. Using person‐level fixed effects models, we find that mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Consequently, the gender gap in work hours has grown by 20 to 50 percent. These findings indicate yet another negative consequence of the COVID‐19 pandemic, highlighting the challenges it poses to women's work hours and employment.

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Unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists

Kyle R. Myers, Wei Yang Tham, Yian Yin … (2020)

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Adv

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Adv

Journal ID (publisher-id): SciAdv

Journal ID (hwp): advances

Title: Science Advances

Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science

ISSN (Electronic): 2375-2548

Publication date Collection: February 2021

Publication date (Electronic): 24 February 2021

Volume: 7

Issue: 9

Electronic Location Identifier: eabd1996

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.

[2 ]BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.

[3 ]Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA.

Author notes

[* ]Corresponding author. Email: allison.morgan@ 123456colorado.edu (A.C.M.); aaron.clauset@ 123456colorado.edu (A.C.)

Author information

Allison C. Morgan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2926-2162

Samuel F. Way http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3173-0490

Michael J. D. Hoefer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9407-8145

Daniel B. Larremore http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5273-5234

Aaron Clauset http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3529-8746

Article

Publisher ID: abd1996

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1996

PMC ID: 7904257

PubMed ID: 33627417

SO-VID: d715d5fc-926b-448f-9c04-5ce329f7b2c2

Copyright © Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.