Snow days, holidays and pandemic quarantines: why we need to be looking after parents
Leah Windsor and Kerry F. Crawford
This blogpost is part of the ‘Women, Gender and Representation in IR’ series International Affairs is curating as part of the 50:50 in 2020 initiative. The core aim of this initiative is to improve the representation of women in the International Relations discipline. We are hoping to achieve this by publicly striving for fifty per cent of all our contributors to the journal to identify as women and by exploring the multitude of forms discrimination and under-representation embody in this space.
Childcare is a crisis much of the time without a pandemic to complicate things. University and school holidays rarely align, and while colleagues without young children herald snow days as bonus research or vacation days, academic parents of young children adjust for rowdy children indoors and out of their normal routine. For most academics who weather the Covid-19 crisis and emerge with their health and their loved ones, the crisis will be a massive professional and personal inconvenience. For parents and primary caregivers in this profession, it may also be a life-changing interruption with multi-year consequences in research productivity and quality of life.
We want to acknowledge at the outset that academics with the flexibility to work from home enjoy a privileged position. No matter how difficult it is to work from home with children, we at least still have our jobs and that is more security than many in the world have at present. Our goal here is to speak to the academics, administrators and decision-makers within universities who are well positioned to change policies in ways that make them more inclusive of parental needs. As administrators consider changing tenure clock timelines, benchmarks and standards, they should consider how the Covid-19 pandemic will exacerbate existing gender inequalities in academia and make provisions in policies that accommodate academic parents — especially women and primary caregivers — accordingly.
It is important to stress here that the care responsibilities of parents and primary caregivers are principally performed by women. In our research on how family formation, parenting, and primary caregiver roles disproportionately affect women, we identify ‘lower order’ — or day-to-day — circumstances and decisions that affect ‘higher order’ outcomes, including well-documented phenomena such as lack of gender parity in publications, rank attainment, service assignment, and bargaining and negotiation failures. This is often taboo to discuss and includes the effects of fertility treatments, infertility, miscarriages, and infant loss, as well as needing extra time to express breast milk during the workday and during job interviews, or temporary cognitive decline due to sleep deprivation in the early years of parenting. They also include the stress of uncertain adoption timelines. Such mental, emotional, psychological, and physical toll of childbearing is disproportionately taken on by women.
On top of the human and economic devastation it is causing, the Covid-19 pandemic health crisis is laying bare many of these existing work-life vulnerabilities. Playdates are discouraged and facilities such as parks, museums and zoos are closed. Homeschooling is the new normal, as unprepared families adjust to their new roles, schedules, and expectations — including reformatting face-to-face classroom material for online formats. While no one was prepared for the massive personal and social upheaval that the coronavirus has created, academic parents and primary caregivers are pulling double duty and institutions must respond accordingly with compassionate and fair accommodations for the long-term repercussions this will have on productivity. This is especially true for graduate students on the job market as well as for pre-tenure and contingent faculty.
Broadly speaking beyond the present pandemic, our institutions must move beyond normalizing family formation to embracing it by addressing issues of implicit bias and structural inequalities. Only by doing this can the gender parity gap in academia decrease. Colleges and universities need to provide more, better, and closer childcare options for faculty and students. They need to adjust gendered expectations about the process of family formation to extend beyond the officially recognized ‘family leave’ twelve weeks, realizing that this timeline is woefully inadequate given that fertility treatments often span years, and the post-partum phase can have far-reaching effects on women and their families. It is clear that even under the best of circumstances, academia remains a profoundly unfair environment for families — yet these are exceptional times that we are in. In many social media threads, our colleagues have mused about strategies for accounting for the widespread disruption of academic status quo, including moving in-class teaching online, interrupted research, assisting students and colleagues in crisis, and overall increased stress levels.
These interruptions multiply affect primary caregivers — especially those with very young children and children with special needs. In 2017, Professor Robert Kelly became an overnight internet sensation when his children interrupted his BBC interview and lecturers everywhere are bracing for similar discontinuity in their online lectures. How am I supposed to teach from home with a baby and toddler? Overnight, academic parents became homeschooling teachers and day care centres. We are refilling snack containers while updating grades, breastfeeding while Zooming, relying on all the parent hacks and tricks to get through the day, and letting the iParent (read: screen time) babysit our children probably more than we are comfortable with. In the short term, we are muddling through.
The long term consequences are even more daunting. The University of Texas at Austin has acknowledged the potential downstream problems arising from the exceptional circumstances of Covid-19 quarantine, including student evaluations of faculty teaching, probationary and annual reviews, research disruption and the impact of the coronavirus on the tenure probationary period. Some have suggested adding a year to pre-tenure faculty’s tenure clock timeline. This generous option will, of course, disadvantage academic caregivers who are not only losing research time, but gaining immeasurable new pressures that already may not be borne equally by parents in the household. Others have made this argument about the unequal benefits of parental leave for fathers who at times use their ‘time-off’ not to parent, but to increase their research output.
In our forthcoming book with Georgetown University Press on gender and bias in family formation in academia, we argue that the standard, one-size-fits-all accommodation strategy needs much more nuance to adjust for the variation in circumstances between families. This need has been brought into sharper focus by the coronavirus outbreak. We ask that the administrators and decision-makers who will soon sit down to craft policy changes in light of the pandemic, consider how they might do so in a way that embraces academic parents and caregivers, and in a manner that takes the gendered nature of care-work into account. Specifically:
- We are not saying parents, especially those with young children, are more stressed than you are… but parents are very stressed.
- Institutions should find ways to compensate structurally for the academic interruptions caused by Covid-19 quarantine.
- In designing policy accommodations, universities must consider the differential effects of the quarantine on parents and caregivers — especially those with young children — and not expect that a one-size-fits-all policy will address coronavirus’s myriad consequences.
Leah Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis and runs the Languages Across Cultures lab. She studies linguistic aspects of political communication in international relations, and gender and bias in family formation in academia.
Kerry F. Crawford is an Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University in Virginia. Her research and teaching focuses on International Relations, human security, gender in war and peace, and parenthood in the academy.
Together they co-authored the forthcoming book, The PhD Parenthood Trap: Gender, Bias, and the Elusive Work-Family Balance in Academia, published by Georgetown University Press.
If you are currently balancing work and childcare at home and want to either share your experience with us or advise us on how journals can help, tell the International Affairs team in the comments or email us.
This blogpost is part of the ‘Women, Gender and Representation in IR’ series International Affairs is curating as part of the 50:50 in 2020 initiative. If you are interested in engaging with this initiative or want to write a blogpost for this series, please email International Affairs’ Junior Editor Leah de Haan at LdeHaan@chathamhouse.org.
