Academic Women’s Labour During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review and Thematic Analysis of the Literature
Keywords:
women, academic labour, COVID-19 pandemic, higher educationAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted academic labour, with women being disproportionately negatively affected. This scoping review provides an exploratory snapshot into the corpus of literature investigating the impact of the pandemic on academic labour. We used a set of criteria to first identify the 86 titles from which we selected 45 as the data set. We analyzed the data on characteristics of location, investigative methods, publication information, and discipline. The findings showed that most of the data were global in context; used primarily qualitative methodologies; published in a wide variety of journals; and spanned diverse disciplines, including science and health, education, business, sociology, and political sciences. We then analyzed the data thematically. The themes we identified were gender inequity, identities and intersectionality, performing work-home binaries, and invisible labour. We added a fifth theme, lived experiences, consisting of women academics’ firsthand accounts. We consider this theme unique, despite its overlap with the other themes, because it is evidence of women academics telling their personal stories. We discuss how our findings show that pandemic conditions worsened existing inequities. The solutions most often cited in the data place emphasis and responsibility on the individual, but we argue that institutions should instead be responsible to redress inequities through improving workplace labour processes. Our research can aid future research on how policy theory can inform socially just policies and practices in the post-pandemic university.
References
Academic Women’s Association. (2019, June 20). U15 leadership remains largely white and male despite 33 years of equity initiatives [Press release]. University of Alberta. https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/u15-leadership-remains-largely-white-and-male-despite-33-years-of-equity-initiatives
Acker, S. (1980). Women, the other academics. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1(1), 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569800010106
Acker, S. (1994). Gendered education: Sociological reflections on women, teaching, and feminism. Open University Press.
Acker, S. (2003). The concerns of Canadian women academics: Will faculty shortages make things better or worse? McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill, 38(3). https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/8702
Acker, S. & Wagner, A. (2019) Feminist scholars working around the neoliberal university. Gender and Education, 31(1), 62–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296117
Bagilhole, B., & Goode, J. (2001). The contradiction of the myth of individual merit, and the reality of a patriarchal support system in academic careers: A feminist investigation. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 8(2), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050680100800203
Blackmore, J. (1989). Educational leadership: A feminist critique and reconstruction. In J. Smyth (Ed.), Critical perspectives on educational leadership (pp. 63–87). Routledge.
Blackmore, J. (1996). Doing ‘emotional labour’ in the education market place: Stories from the field of women in management. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 17(3), 337–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630960170304
Brooks, A. & Mackinnon, A. (Eds.). (2001). Gender and the restructured university: Changing management and culture in higher education. Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.
Brunette-Debassige (Mushkego-ininew Cree), C. (2021). The trickiness of settler colonialism: Indigenous women administrators’ experiences of policy in Canadian universities (Publication No. 7702) [Doctoral dissertation, Western University]. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7702
Brunette-Debassige (Mushkego-ininew Cree), C. (2023). Indigenous refusals in educational leadership practices in Canadian universities. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 19(2), 377–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801231167876
Busch, L. (2017). Knowledge for sale: The neoliberal takeover of higher education. MIT Press.
Caplan, P. J. & Caplan, J. B. (1994). Thinking critically about research on sex and gender. HarperCollins College Publishers.
Carbado, D. W., Crenshaw, K. W., Mays, V. M., & Tomlinson, B. (2013). Intersectionality: Mapping the movements of a theory. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 10(2), 303–312. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x13000349
Carvalho, T. (2019). Women in higher education top positions: The relevance of field dynamics. In P. Paoloni, M. Paoloni, & S. Arduini (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Gender Research, April 2019 (pp. 129-134, XV). Academic Conferences International Limited.
Carvalho, T., & Machado-Taylor, M. (2010). Gender and shifts in higher education managerial regimes. Australian Universities Review, 52(2), 33–42.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2017). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Fitzgerald, T., White, J., & Gunter, H. M. (Eds.) (2012). Hard labour? Academic work and the changing landscape of higher education (International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Vol. 7). Emerald Group Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3628(2012)0000007012
Hannah, E., Paul, L.J., & Vethamany-Globus, S. (2002). Women in the Canadian academic tundra: Challenging the chill. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Hornby, P., & Shaw, S. (1996). Women in management education: The token topic? In L. Morley & V. Walsh (Eds.), Breaking Boundaries: Women in higher education (pp. 77–88). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203978689
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. SAGE Publications.
Lynch, K. (2006). Neo-liberalism and marketisation: The implications for higher education. European Educational Research Journal, 5(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2006.5.1.1
Magoqwana, B., Maqabuka, Q., & Tshoaedi, M. (2019). “Forced to care” at the neoliberal university: Invisible labour as academic labour performed by Black women academics in the South African university. South African Review of Sociology, 50(3–4), 6–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2020.1730947
Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. Jossey-Bass.
Mertens, D. M. (2019). Research and evaluation in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Murray Li, T. (2007). Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2), 263–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140701254308
Nowell, L. S., Norris, J. M., White, D. E., & Moules, N. J. (2017). Thematic analysis: Striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847
Reid, R. A. (2021). Retaining women faculty: The problem of invisible labor. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(3), 504–506. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096521000056
Rickett, B., & Morris, A. (2021). ‘Mopping up tears in the academy’ – working-class academics, belonging, and the necessity for emotional labour in UK academia. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(1), 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1834952
Stalker, J., & Prentice, S. (1998). The illusion of inclusion: Women in post-secondary education. Fernwood.
Tricco, A. C., Lillie, E., Zarin, W., O’Brien, K. K., Colquhoun, H., Levac, D., Moher, D., Peters, M. D. J., Horsley, T., Weeks, L., Hempel, S., Akl, E. A., Chang, C., McGowan, J., Stewart, L., Hartling, L., Aldcroft, A., Wilson, M. G., Garritty, … Straus, S. E. (2018). PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR): Checklist and explanation. Annals of Internal Medicine, 169(7), 467–473. https://doi.org/10.7326/m18-0850
Wallace, J., & Wallin, D. (2015). ‘The voice inside herself’: Transforming gendered academic identities in educational administration. Gender and Education, 27(4), 412–429. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2015.1019838
Wallin, D., & Wallace, J. (2016). From Foxy Loxy to grit and moxie: Challenging the orthodoxy. In L. Shultz & M. Viczko (Eds.), Assembling and governing the higher education institution: Democracy, social justice and leadership in global higher education (pp. 361–383). Palgrave MacMillan.
Wallace, J., Wallin, D., Viczko, M., & Anderson, H. (2014). The first female academics in programs of educational administration in Canada: Riding waves of opportunity. McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill, 49(2), 437–458. https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9016
Wichroski, M. (1994). The secretary: Invisible labor in the workworld of women. Human Organization, 53(1), 33–41. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.53.1.a1205g53j7334631
Wright-Mair, R. (2022). The costs of staying: Experiences of racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty in the field of higher education. Innovative Higher Education, 48, 329–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-022-09620-x
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Mara De Giusti Bordignon, Melody Viczko
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
