In an earlier post, I have outlined a scenario of COVID-19 impacts on women in the general workforce. In this post, I explore the situation of women in higher education: They hold 49 percent of total faculty positions but just 38 percent of the coveted (and increasingly rare) tenured jobs, which provide the strongest protection against layoffs. Together with many structural problems in higher-ed, this puts women at an outsized risk of leaving the workforce. Instruction and research may become a lot less gender diverse.
Here is a scenario narrative, written from the perspective of ca. 2030.
COVID-19 hit higher ed hard. Many institutions who were weakened by decreasing undergraduate enrollment and diminishing state support before the crisis had to shut their doors. Others quickly moved courses online, while experimenting with different models to safely reopen campus again. None of these moves provided much financial stability. Universities continued to struggle with depleted state funding, devalued endowments, and the need to practice social distancing on campus. Students adapted: many bothered not to move to campus for a much diminished campus experience and selected online options, others put off college all together. International students were concerned about never making it to campus through mounting travel constraints or worried about catching the virus while in a foreign country. They chose options closer to home.
To attract student, some US universities decided to offer “bare bone” online education at reduced tuition - with limited access to expensive on-campus support services. Many continued these programs even after the worst of the pandemic had passed. Services like counseling, student support, health services, and extracurricular activities were cut, resulting in layoffs of female employees.
While some institutions managed to carve out a niche in the online market, most found themselves competing against an ever broader pool of competitors with almost identical programs. As cost-cutting continued, administrations laid off adjunct instructors who were not protected by tenure and often female. They concurrently increased the teaching loads of tenured professors, who were ca. 70% male. Their pushback was mild, compared to the campus discussions before the social distancing era: Professors wanted to save their institutions and jobs. They had become used to online formats and after several semesters of course development and improvement, many found it easy to take over ready-made online classes from their former colleagues. Some even preferred it over competing for shrinking research funding in all, but COVID-19 related fields.
Those not yet tenured or in post-doc positions were impacted by closed labs, additional workloads as a result of moving classes online, and missing network opportunities during conferences an research stays. Researchers who were not yet established left academia in droves, unable to find a foothold under impossible conditions. Faculty on tenure-track positions were quickly guaranteed that universities would take their special circumstances into consideration during promotion and tenure. It turned out, however, that the impacts of the “special circumstances” were not evenly distributed between men and women: Less than three months into the pandemic, early paper and grant submission data suggested that men were able to use the involuntary break through lockdowns to produce papers, while female paper submissions dropped - most likely due to added childcare responsibilities. (Similar patterns were observed before the pandemic in the context of family leave after childbirth - fathers who stopped the tenure clock became more productive, mothers only managed to maintain their earlier productivity levels, thus still putting them at a disadvantage in direct comparison with male colleagues).
Women were also called upon for different work than men: In line with traditional gender expectations, students tended to reach out to female professors more frequently with problems and personal challenges - as those increased in the pandemic, women spent more time on advising. At the same time, in an effort to have female perspectives represented, universities invited women to serve on task forces relating to the transition measures. In fields that had few women to start with, this created an increase in their service loads.
The disruptions of the pandemic, luckily, lasted less than two years but this was a critical time for early-stage academics. By the time their cases were evaluated for post-doc scholarships, faculty positions, or tenure, memories had begun to fade. More importantly, it had never fully sunk in that the pandemic affected different researchers differently and that many of these differences ran along gender lines. Women lost access to a shrinking number of academic positions.
Students enrolling in the years after the pandemic were thus less likely to be instructed by a woman and even less so by younger female instructors, who were closer to their own demographic. For many college students, this sent the implicit signal that academic careers were not for women.
At this point, the “Great Retreat” is conjecture - a thought experiment, not a prediction. Things will not happen in exactly this way. The purpose of scenarios is to innovate and change the trajectory. But this requires the insight that we are not really "in this together" but that the pandemic affects us differently.