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3 Academic Productivity and Institutional Responses
Pages 47-56

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From page 47...
... . Meanwhile, Black, Indigenous, and Latina women tend to be concentrated 1  This chapter is primarily based on the commissioned paper "The Impact of COVID-19 on Tenure Clocks, the Evaluation of Productivity, and Academic STEMM Career Trajectories," by Felicia A
From page 48...
... BROADER LABOR MARKET EFFECTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC To contextualize how COVID-19 has the potential to affect women's academic careers and trajectories, it is helpful to consider the pandemic's overall gendered labor market effects. Recent economic recessions in the United States resulted in employment losses that were larger for men than women (Hoynes et al., 2012)
From page 49...
... EFFECTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON ACADEMIC PRODUCTIVITY IN 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic affected the current and future academic workforce, which includes postdoctoral scholars, non-tenure-track faculty, and tenuretrack faculty among others with teaching and researching responsibilities. At the end of summer 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the largest-ever decline in college and university employment: "At no point since the bureau began keeping industry tallies in the late 1950s have colleges and universities ever shed so many employees at such an incredible rate" (Bauman, 2020)
From page 50...
... .3 Longer-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic could include the influence of changes in academic productivity on the career trajectories of STEMM researchers. Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Academic Productivity and Careers of Early-Career STEMM Researchers Although the evidence as to how COVID-19 will impact opportunities in the academic STEMM workforce was still developing, studies in 2020 found that STEMM academic researchers, especially postdoctoral scholars, were deeply concerned about their future.
From page 51...
... . As a result, scholars are calling on postsecondary institutions to provide childcare supports, increase funding opportunities, and carefully manage tenure and promotion criteria for women faculty (e.g., prioritize women-authored papers, monitor teaching and service responsibilities)
From page 52...
... In addition, researchers investigating gender disparities in published research during the COVID-19 pandemic found that, compared with models predicting authorship for women based on data from 2019, the proportion of women authors publishing on all topics as the first author decreased by 4.9 percent (Muric et al., 2020)
From page 53...
... . Addressing these disparities calls for institutional responses such as targeted recruitment and retention of Black women in STEMM fields, thereby creating an environment that encourages and nurtures diversity in collaboration and talent, a sense of belonging for Black women in STEMM, and positive morale for the institution's current and future researchers (Carr, 2020)
From page 54...
... However, future research will be required to isolate the effects of institutional affiliation on academic productivity during the pandemic, if such differences do exist. EFFECTS OF INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON ACADEMIC CAREERS AND PRODUCTIVITY Postsecondary institutions find themselves in uncharted territory financially as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have responded in several ways, including reducing overtime work hours for nonfaculty members, eliminating merit increases, reducing salaries of leadership members, obtaining additional 5  Although some academic institutions did not give faculty members any choice in teaching mode, many provided options for faculty who are in higher-risk brackets for COVID-19 to teach remotely or in person as well as resources for faculty who need to teach from home.
From page 55...
... . For example, the NIH allowed clinicians to extend their research work if they postponed a career development award to aid frontline workers.
From page 56...
... CONCLUSIONS The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic productivity and career trajectories cannot be adequately evaluated without acknowledging the intersecting identities of, and structural forces affecting, different groups of STEMM researchers. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the academic STEMM job market, notions of academic productivity, and institutional responses each play out in different ways depending on the unique circumstances of individual institutions and individual STEMM researchers and faculty members.


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