The pandemic is a new setback for women in academia who already faced obstacles on the path to advancing their research and careers.
Many universities struggled to put meaningful policies in place to help faculty, especially caretakers and women. During the summer break ahead of this fall semester, administrators at some institutions, including the ones where Dr. Warner and Dr. Escallón teach, began to reassess and develop strategies that experts say are a palatable start to stymieing crises caused by Covid-19.
But the issues that women in academia are now facing are not new. Instead, they are more severe versions of longstanding gender gaps that already cause universities to hemorrhage female faculty, particularly women of color, and will require measures that go beyond institutional responses to the pandemic.
The pandemic has laid bare gender inequities across the country, and women in academia have not been spared. The outbreak erupted during universities’ spring terms, hastily forcing classes online and researchers out of their laboratories. Faculty with young or school-aged children — especially women — had to juggle teaching their students with overseeing their children’s distance learning from home.