The pandemic and the academic mothers: present hardships and future perspectives

Gender differences in academia are well-known. Women publish less, achieve higher positions less frequently, and have more interrupted careers. Mothers, more than fathers or childless men and women, suffer these disadvantages. Women academics have to deal with the work-family conflict, the participation in both work and family roles are incompatibly demanding. The closure of childcare services and the impossibility to benefit from informal care (mainly via grandparents) made the pandemic a potential accelerator of these drawbacks for academic mothers. Academic work is basically incompatible with the everyday care of children. Analyzing in-depth interviews, in this article we show how mothers of young children had to reorganize their job priorities during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Moreover, we describe the perceived effects of the pandemic on their future career. We showed that the pandemic changed the priorities of academic mothers in a direction that is unfavorable to their careers: mothers devoted most of their time to teaching duties and stopped research. Moreover, they felt an increased gap in their relative competitiveness with male and childless colleagues.