Academic mothers, professional identity and COVID-19: Feminist reflections on career cycles, progression and practice

Based on a collection of auto-ethnographic narratives that reflect our experiences as academic mothers at an Australian university, this paper seeks to illustrate the impact of COVID-19 on our career cycles in order to explore alternative feminist models of progression and practice in Higher Education. Collectively, we span multiple disciplines, parenting profiles, and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Our narratives (initiated in 2019) explicate four focal points in our careers as a foundation for analyzing self-definitions of professional identity: pre- and post-maternity career break; and pre- and post-COVID-19 career. We have modeled this research on a collective feminist research practice that is generative and empowering in terms of self-reflective models of collaborative research. Considering this practice and these narratives, we argue for a de-centering of masculinized career cycle patterns and progression pathways both now and beyond COVID-19. This represents both a challenge to neo-liberal norms of academic productivity, as well as a call to radically enhance institutional gender equality policies and practice.