This is being written in the second week of March 2020, as universities across Europe and North America begin announcing the suspension of in-person teaching and as research laboratories are receiving guidance to scale down operations, send graduate students home, and delay fieldwork and data collection that cannot be done remotely. The scale of the disruption is not yet fully clear — we do not know how long this will last, how many countries will be affected, or what the research system will look like on the other side. What we do have is a body of prior research on how sudden, large disruptions to research careers affect women differently from men. That research provides a basis for a prospective analysis of what is likely to happen — not a prediction, but an evidence-based anticipation that may inform policy now.
The relevant prior literature comes from two main sources: studies of the impact of the 2008-2009 financial crisis on academic research careers, and the existing literature on what researchers sometimes call the "double burden" — the well-documented pattern by which women in academia carry a disproportionate share of domestic and caregiving responsibilities relative to their male colleagues at equivalent career stages.
What the 2008-2009 Crisis Research Showed
The global financial crisis of 2008-2009 produced research funding contractions in several countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and others — that were large enough to constitute career-shock events for researchers at vulnerable career stages. Studies conducted in the years following the crisis, examining publication trajectories, grant success rates, and faculty hiring by gender, found a consistent pattern: women researchers were more adversely affected by funding contractions than men at equivalent career stages.
The mechanism was not primarily overt discrimination, though that was a factor in some hiring decisions. It was the interaction of the crisis with pre-existing career-stage vulnerability: women were, on average, concentrated at earlier career stages (postdoctoral researcher, assistant professor, lecturer) where employment was less secure and where the impact of a hiring freeze or a grant cycle cancellation was more severe. Women were also, on average, more likely to be in positions without long-term institutional funding guarantees. When funding contracted, the positions that were cut first were often the positions that women disproportionately occupied.
Publication lag analysis from the post-2008 period also suggested that women's publication rates were more affected by the crisis period than men's, and that the gap in publication output that opened during the crisis period did not fully close in the subsequent recovery years. If this pattern held for the current disruption, the career-stage and prestige-hierarchy effects of reduced output during a crisis period could have consequences that outlasted the crisis itself.
The Double-Burden Prediction
The literature on the double burden — the phenomenon by which women in academic employment carry disproportionate domestic and caregiving responsibility relative to men in comparable positions — predicts a specific vulnerability in a pandemic shutdown scenario. When schools close and childcare is unavailable, the default allocation of caregiving falls along existing patterns. Research conducted well before the current situation consistently found that in heterosexual dual-academic-career households, women were more likely than men to reduce or interrupt their research time when caregiving demands increased.
A university-wide transition to working from home, combined with school closures, was likely to increase the caregiving demands on all academic parents. The question of whether those demands would fall disproportionately on women was, on the available prior research evidence, not a question: they would. This did not mean every household would follow the aggregate pattern; it meant that the aggregate pattern, well-established in the literature, would likely be visible at scale in the data that researchers would collect in the months and years after the current period.
Women at mid-career stages — assistant professors in their peak publication years, postdoctoral researchers trying to establish their research profiles — were particularly exposed. These were the career stages where research time was most directly translated into the output (publications, grant applications, presentations) that determined career progression, and where a sustained period of reduced output would do the most damage to career trajectories. They were also, as the double-burden literature documented, the career stages when caregiving responsibilities were typically most intensive.
Fieldwork and International Research
One dimension of the pandemic's research disruption was specific to certain fields and to international research. Fieldwork — in ecology, anthropology, public health, geology, archaeology, and other disciplines that required physical presence in data collection sites — was among the most completely suspended research activities. For women researchers in these fields, who included the majority of early-career fieldwork researchers in some disciplines, the fieldwork suspension represented not a slowdown but a complete stop to the data collection that underpinned their research programmes.
International research — fieldwork in other countries, laboratory collaborations requiring physical co-presence, conference presentations and networking — was similarly affected. The international dimension was particularly relevant for women researchers in developing nations, for whom international collaboration was often the primary mechanism for accessing research infrastructure and knowledge networks that were not available at home institutions. Travel restrictions that prevented a Kenyan graduate student from visiting a European laboratory partner, or a Brazilian postdoctoral researcher from presenting at a North American conference, were not equally costly to all researchers: the asymmetry in research infrastructure meant that the researchers most dependent on international access bore proportionately higher costs from the shutdown.
What Should Be Monitored
This analysis does not claim to know what the outcome of the current period will be for women's research careers. The prior research suggests likely patterns; it does not guarantee them. What the prior research most firmly supports is a call for deliberate data collection: universities, funding agencies, and professional organisations should be recording gender-disaggregated data on research output, grant applications, hiring decisions, and career-interruption requests during this period, so that the equity impacts can be measured rather than estimated after the fact.
The funding agencies that are in a position to make policy decisions — whether to extend grant timelines for career interruptions, whether to adjust evaluation criteria for periods with limited output, whether to create dedicated recovery funding for researchers most affected by the shutdown — will be better positioned to make those decisions if they have collected the data that shows who has been affected and how. The time to design that data collection is now, while the policies that will determine what can be tracked are still being set.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are women researchers expected to be disproportionately affected by a pandemic research shutdown?
Two converging factors: the double-burden literature showing women bear disproportionate caregiving responsibilities in most dual-career households (meaning school closures fall on them asymmetrically), and the career-stage vulnerability documented in the 2008-2009 financial crisis research (women are concentrated at earlier, less secure career stages where disruption has greater career impact).
What does "career shock" mean in the context of research careers?
A career shock is a sudden, large disruption to the conditions under which a research career operates — a funding contraction, a pandemic shutdown, a conflict-related displacement. The research literature on career shocks in academic science finds that their effects are not uniformly distributed across the research workforce; gender, career stage, and institutional position all mediate how severe the impact is.
Is this analysis a prediction of what will happen?
No — it is a prospective analysis based on prior research, written at the onset of the disruption. The outcomes for women's research careers during and after the pandemic period will depend on institutional policy responses, on how long the disruption lasts, and on many individual-level factors that the aggregate literature cannot predict. The analysis identifies the risk patterns; the outcomes are not yet known.
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