The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2021) / Chapter Skim
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4 Work-Life Boundaries and Gendered Divisions of Labor
4 Work-Life Boundaries and Gendered Divisions of Labor
Pages 57-68
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From page 57... ...
This chapter focuses on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the personal-professional boundary interface and work-life issues for women in academic STEMM; how gendered expectations of domestic labor and caregiving responsibilities for children and elders have shifted or affected professional labor and well-being for women; how research has informed emerging 1 This chapter is primarily based on the commissioned paper "Boundaryless Work: The Impact of COVID-19 on Work-Life Boundary Management, Integration, and Gendered Divisions of Labor for Academic Women in STEMM," by Ellen Ernst Kossek, Tammy Allen, and Tracy L Dumas.
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From page 58... ...
These themes reflect how work-family dynamics play out in academic social contexts that can be characterized as not being responsive to a growing mismatch between women faculty's career and personal life synthesis needs and the design of academic institutions. Foundational Concepts from the Work-Life Literature Work-Family Conflict, Enrichment, and Gender Tensions between work and nonwork lives can be understood from the individual and organizational psychological science behind role theory and the associated concepts of role conflict and enrichment.
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From page 59... ...
This relationship between multiple roles is most likely to occur when one's work and nonwork demands can be carried out in ways that align with preferences for how one synthesizes work and nonwork roles. For example, employed men reported positive work-to-family enrichment relationships in the transfer of positive emotions and engagement from the work-to-family realms, while women are depleted in the spillover from work-to-family roles (Rothbard, 2001)
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. However, besides family structures, organizational policies, job structures, and occupational norms may determine the extent to which individuals have the ability to integrate or segment work and nonwork roles, as well as their overall amount of control over the work-nonwork boundary (Allen et al., 2014; Ashforth et al., 2000; Kossek, 2016)
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. Women's Second Shift at Work and Home, Diverse Needs, and Ideal Worker Tensions The extra work and nonwork demands that women faculty face compared with their counterparts who are men are numerous.
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. Academic Scientists as Overloaded Ideal Workers With increasing workloads and the rise of personal electronic devices that blur work-life boundaries, many academic STEMM professionals face role overload.
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, which can impact how work-life boundaries are managed in racially and genderimbalanced work units. Boundary Management of Personal Identities in Gender and Racially Imbalanced Contexts Whereas most research has focused on boundary management as a means to handle conflicting role demands, existing research also addresses the effect of boundaries on workplace relationships and employees' professional identities (Dumas et al., 2013; Dumas and Sanchez-Burks, 2015)
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. For example, Black employees report refraining from disclosing personal information to their white coworkers because of concerns over career repercussions (Phillips et al., 2018)
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From page 65... ...
Many private-sector employers offer customized, reducedload work options to enable high-talent employees to experience a more balanced life during career advancement as a means of fostering sustainable careers and retaining employees (Kossek and Ollier-Malaterre, 2019)
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POST-COVID-19 PANDEMIC LITERATURE: CHANGES TO BOUNDARIES, BOUNDARY CONTROL, AND WELL-BEING Given the lead-time for publishing academic articles, few published studies directly examine work-life challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic for women faculty in STEMM. However, the common themes in the articles published during 2020 were consistent with findings in foundational work-family literature and, while not STEMM specific, with the literature on the work-life challenges of academic motherhood (Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2012)
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women faculty members and 55 Italian women faculty members, all of whom had children, the women reported a perceived cognitive deficit from managing the demands of children all day (Minello, 2020)
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. CONCLUSIONS Women faculty in STEMM faced unique challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic related to juggling growing second-shift challenges juxtaposed with increased boundary permeability, rising workloads, and persistent ideal-worker cultures.
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