Flexible-work policies intended to support parents and carers at universities can unintentionally reinforce traditional gender roles, according to research published this year. Studies suggest that women academics often use flexibility to take on more childcare, while men may use the same arrangements to justify doing less, leaving women with a heavier parenting load and potential career penalties.
Flexible working conditions often mean mothers in academia do more parenting than men. Credit: Jelena Cvetkovic/Alamy
Universities “have all these policies in place, and we see so many women in science,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. This can lead people to assume that women can participate in academic work as much as men. But “the problem is being solved with women carrying an extraordinary burden,” she says.
Research has already shown that parenthood affects the careers of female academics more than those of male academics. Sugimoto and her colleagues wanted to measure how much parenting academics do and how it affects their productivity.
The researchers surveyed more than 10,000 academics with children and with academic or non-academic partners at universities and research organizations around the world.1 They found that women in academia were more likely to be the lead parent and to carry out most parenting tasks. Even when women shared parenting or took a secondary role — described by the authors as “satellite parenting” — they did more than men who occupied the same role.
The only task men consistently did more often than women was coaching their children’s sports teams, says survey co-author Gemma Derrick, a meta-researcher at the University of Bristol, UK.
The team then examined why women academics were doing more parenting. It found that women used flexible-work policies, such as adjusting their hours to start earlier or finish later, to take on additional childcare responsibilities.2 In academic couples, men sometimes used flexibility to explain why they did less parenting. For example, some said that their partner had chosen a more flexible career to look after the children.
A female academic from the United Kingdom told the survey that workplace flexibility made it easy for her partner to rely on her “always being available” to help with the children. Another academic from the United States said: “I have the flexibility to drop off, pick up kids, send them for all activities, and feed them. I have the flexibility to make up all the work time I give up during daytime at night, work till 2am or at least midnight.”
Sanjee Perera, a workforce researcher at Adelaide University in Australia, says academia creates an “illusion of flexibility” because researchers have considerable autonomy to fit work around family responsibilities. At the same time, researchers are expected to publish papers, secure external funding, supervise students, teach and attend conferences, she says. “It’s almost like an open-ended workload.”
Perceptions of lower commitment
When male academics tried to use flexible working to take on more parenting, they often encountered belittling comments or career consequences, Derrick says. The perception of parenting as a gendered responsibility is changing over time, she adds. “The question is whether it’s changing fast enough.”
Another survey of 26 female academics in the United Kingdom, conducted by Guoxin Ma, a workplace-equity researcher at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester, UK, and colleagues, found that flexible-work policies such as working from home or adjusting working hours made it harder for women to progress in their careers after having children.3
Some respondents said they were seen as less committed because they worked from home, left work early or worked part-time. Others said they continued working while on parental leave because nobody else was available to do their work.
Effects of the pandemic
Parenting became more equal in many households during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sugimoto says. Some couples cared for their children on alternating days or in shifts, particularly when one parent had fixed working hours.
Flexible working arrangements existed before the pandemic, but hybrid work, including online teaching and meetings, has since become more widely accepted.4
Source: www.nature.com
