Like women in every other sector of the economy, the COVID pandemic has negatively impacted those working in academic medicine according to a commentary which appears in Nature Medicine.
Co-author Anne B. Curtis, MD, professor at the University at Buffalo, laid out the problem: “During the first year of the pandemic, when schools shut down and went to 100% remote learning, we saw that it affected women disproportionately, having to stay home and teach their children while their research languished.”
Even before the COVID pandemic, women in academic medicine were paid less than men in comparable positions, received lower startup funds for laboratory research and were promoted later.
Additionally, they wrote that, compared to men, women have fewer “conventional markers of achievement” in academia, such as principal investigator positions on research grants. Women write fewer grant applications; they have fewer grant renewals; they get lower funding amounts for initial grants; and are first or last author on fewer papers.
The reasons for these are well known, the authors wrote.
“Society expects women to assume the major portion of the burden for child rearing, and women themselves feel an obligation to put family above their own needs, to the detriment of their own career development,” she said. “There still isn’t the sharing of responsibilities in two-career families to mitigate these problems.”
The paper includes a detailed ‘menu’ of proposed solutions. These include providing financial support to hire technicians for two to three years to carry on lab research while women researchers focus on child care at home, or otherwise supporting child care at home so women can continue their lab research.
The paper also proposes slowing down tenure clocks, delaying the tenure decision by two to three years to make up for lost time while women give birth and care for young children.
In addition to such programs, the list includes a category of solutions termed “cultural,” described as creating the cultural expectation that gender equity is a shared responsibility and incorporating those expectations into bonuses and merit raises of institutional leaders. Also included is the need to engage university and hospital boards of trustees to support gender equity.
Prof Curtis said that the paper aims to highlight the persistence of these gender differences persist and that global phenomena like the pandemic only worsen them.
“As much as we would like to think that gender differences in career development no longer exist, they do, and they adversely affect women more than men,” she said. “Understanding these issues and implementing solutions are the best ways to minimise potentially adverse effects on women’s careers.”
As the pandemic and its associated restrictions ease, Prof Curtis warned, “The situation is improving now that schools are open, but the next pandemic may only be a mutation away.”
Source: Buffalo University
