Gender Gap in Research Output Widens During Pandemic

Experts identify childcare, which tends to fall to women, as one likely cause for the relative decrease in women’s scientific productivity compared with men’s.

Written byKatarina Zimmer
| 8 min read
women gender gap science stem academic scholarly publishing research producivity pandemic coronavirus covid-19 shutdown childcare daycare school parenting arxiv biorxiv medrxiv stem

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When New York City went into lockdown in mid-March and most research had to be put on hold, virologist Benhur Lee’s lab at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine was one of the few still running. The lab and its 10 researchers had pivoted their studies of various viruses to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But with schools and daycare centers also closed, Jillian Carmichael—a postdoc and the only mother in the lab—couldn’t join the team. Instead, she spent two months inside a 600-square-foot apartment in Queens, taking care of her six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son as her husband, who works in healthcare, conducted telemedicine over the phone.

Although noise-cancelling headphones allowed her to get some work done from home, and her husband took on his fair share of childcare, her research on herpesviruses was put largely on hold, and she wasn’t able to contribute ...

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  • katya katarina zimmer

    After a year teaching an algorithm to differentiate between the echolocation calls of different bat species, Katarina decided she was simply too greedy to focus on one field of science and wanted to write about all of them. Following an internship with The Scientist in 2017, she’s been happily freelancing for a number of publications, covering everything from climate change to oncology. Katarina is a news correspondent for The Scientist and contributes occasional features to the magazine. Find her on Twitter @katarinazimmer and read her work on her website.

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