Pandemic Shadows: Unmasking Gender Disparities in Academic Productivity and Work-Family Conflict

Women academics experience inequalities across multiple facets in the university context, including research productivity; teaching, advising and mentoring responsibilities; service workload; and cross-over stress between work and family obligations. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these gender disparities. Drawing upon 2021 data from 467 research faculty and staff at a lead research university in Canada, we highlight such inequalities. While descriptive statistics suggest that men and women report similar perceived setbacks in productivity due to COVID-19, results from structural equation models (SEM) estimating mediating associations tell a different story. These analyses demonstrate that women were disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts during the pandemic because of unequal exposure to work-family conflict, which strongly correlates with the perception of lost productivity. We further hypothesized that faculty and research staff with young children would perceive lowered productivity during the pandemic, and that these burdens would be stronger for women than men. However, we did not find evidence to support these predictions. We unpack these results and conclude our paper with a discussion about the importance of rethinking the operationalization of "productivity" in post-secondary institutions, given women's differential exposure and vulnerability to stressors during the pandemic.