Checking in on Pandemic Impact on Women in Science

Before the pandemic, less than 30% of the world’s STEM researchers were women. When the lockdowns started, it didn’t take long for warning signs about women’s ability to get their work done to emerge, including in science. I’ve written before about pockets and waves of de-feminization in science’s past. When people started sharing data on women’s reduced publication rate in the pandemic, I worried about whether we were entering another.

Now that it’s been a few years, I’ve checked in to see how gender diversity seems to be faring. Were there lasting setbacks, or would women scientists be enabled to bounce back?

It’s too soon to know about potential long-term impact of course, or whether there’s discernible change in some slow-moving major indicators like the demography of tenured professors. There’s been very little shift in the proportion of women faculty in US academia, for example, from 2013 to 2022. So for this post, I dug into some measures more likely to be sensitive to short-term impact – rates of publication and journal peer review, and grants. And I searched for research that might show what happened beyond the early days of the pandemic.

I was bracing for bad news, so it was a relief to see some signs for optimism – even though the pandemic has been so awful for so many. It’s a long list of hardship and headwinds: Traumatic brushes with the virus, loved ones lost, struggles with social turmoil and/or increased caregiving loads – not to mention the additional workload associated with teaching in a pandemic. Let’s start with the research on the scientist-specific challenges.

Women scientists’ experiences

I’m concentrating here on the broad picture. That’s not going to be as relevant in every place and every person’s social situation. The impact of the pandemic could also vary according to the type of science people do, and their career stage.

There have been a lot of qualitative studies and surveys internationally. In a scoping review, Giulia Inguaggiato and colleagues analyzed 35 of them from the English-language literature up to February 2023 (2024). Their findings make for grim reading. Already-gendered burdens fell even more heavily on women in the early pandemic – like the increased social and psychological needs of students.

There seems to be a lot of studies, though, that weren’t included in that scoping review. Tanya Blowers and colleagues did a mixed methods study, including a survey of women in STEM through the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OSWD) with nearly 1,500 participants – with just over half coming from Sub-Saharan Africa (2022).

The most common problems reported by the OSWD participants were “being unable to travel to conferences or other important work events, being unable to perform experiments or do field work, being unable to follow courses or teach, as well as the delay of pending publications. Other negative impacts included the delay or suspension of ongoing funding, difficulty in finding collaborators, being unable to submit funding proposals or research for publication, missing out on business opportunities or clients and being unable to take exams as scheduled.”

Positive effects were reported too, “including being more involved in their children’s education, improved relationships with their children and partners, a more equitable distribution of household chores and/or childcare, and greater maturity acquired by their children.”

Anna Carreri and colleagues, in their study of academics in Italy, stress that the drag on scientific work and careers did not affect all women equally (2023). They pointed out that “both men and women with certain characteristics were able to ‘benefit’ from the pandemic by working nonstop and adhering to the model of the ‘ideal academic’, potentially leading to faster career advancement.” Social class and life/career stage, for example, intersected with gender, with varying implications.

In their study of researchers in Spain, Anna Sala-Bubaré and colleagues found that women were more likely to report that they sacrificed personal wellbeing and work-life balance to keep up with work (2023): “More specifically, researchers mentioned working more (‘Working more and faster’… ‘Working non-stop’…) and at ill-timed hours (‘Working until sunrise’…). Many mentioned sacrificing their sleep, and some even explicitly said they renounced spending time with their families.”

Many of the surveys had very low response rates, though, making it very hard to gauge the general impact – an they tended to be done fairly early in the pandemic.

Publication rates and peer review

The context here is very complicated. Publications about the virus and pandemic exploded, leading to an abnormally high amount of scientific literature, especially in the medical sciences (see for example, Squazzoni 2021). Also, publication can take a long time: Articles appearing early in the pandemic had likely been in the works for a very long time.

Kiran Lee and colleagues have published a systematic review of studies of pandemic impact on women and publication, including 55 studies (2023). However, their search was up to 2022, so they couldn’t chart longterm outcomes. The median time that data was collected in these studies was only 7 months after the declaration of the pandemic.

Kiran et al included both surveys and studies of publication rates, calculating effect sizes using both of those study types. I’m not comfortable with that approach, especially when you consider what low response rates many of these surveys had. Indeed, they found that the gender effect was larger when you considered only the survey responses.

The studies of publication rates found a negative pandemic impact on the rate of women’s publications (–0.047, 95% CI=−0.085 to −0.008, P=0.017, SE = 0.020). The result for the rate of women’s submission of articles was similar.

The largest gender gap was in social sciences, followed by medicine – the areas of science with the large explosion of Covid-related literature. The authors point out that this was a possible explanation for the effect they found: Perhaps pandemic strains and women’s professional networks etc meant they weren’t able to pivot as easily. Publishing in medicine was also different in the pandemic, as medical journals sped up their processes in response to the need for Covid data. There was little pandemic effect, Kiran and co found, for multidisciplinary fields, biological sciences, or the combination of technology, engineering, mathematics, chemistry and physics.

I didn’t come across much more recent data than in Kiran’s review. But here’s where this post starts taking a more optimistic turn. The authors of a later Australian study reported that women’s publication rate normalized in 2021 (Ryan 2023). And a study from a medical faculty in the US reported that taking publications along with ethics committee and grant submissions into account, women physicians’ academic productivity outpaced men’s in their institution (Buckman 2023).

Another indicator of academic work is participation in peer review. Flaminio Squazzoni and colleagues studied peer review at over 2,300 Elsevier journals (2021). They didn’t find a change in gender diversity in peer review – except for in health and medicine, where there was such a high amount of Covid-related publication. That wasn’t uniform, though. Khaoula Ben Messaoud and colleagues studied over 180,000 peer review invitations at 21 BMJ medical journals between January 2018 and May 2021 (2023). Follow-up continued to February 2022. About 30% of peer reviews were provided by women, and that proportion didn’t change significantly during the pandemic.

Grants

I didn’t find much analysis of grant submissions and grants. The study in one US institution I mentioned above didn’t find a negative impact of the pandemic on women’s rate of grant submissions (Buckman 2023). The finding was the same in a study of grant submissions and grant review panel participation in 14 research organizations in the US (Roubinov 2023). However, that study had a very low response rate from research organizations, so the sample may not be at all representative.

A study in a couple of US institutions reported that there was a negative impact in submissions to the National Institutes of Health (NIH): “In 2019 (prepandemic), there was no significant difference in the average number of grants submitted by women compared with men faculty. In contrast, women faculty submitted significantly fewer grants in 2020 (during the pandemic) than men.” (Roubinov 2022)

The major US public funding agencies for science publish data about their awards, though, so I dug into that. I look forward to seeing thorough analyses of what’s been happening. I found a brief scan of the data reassuring. Although there’s still a major gender gap between male and female principal investigators, the gap has been continuing to narrow since 2019.

Table: Percentage of grants awarded to women principal investigators (PIs) by the US National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation

(Data and data sources below.)

Given the importance of grant funding for both ongoing work and career prospects, seeing that was a big relief, even though there could be lots going on beneath that reassuring surface. What’s been happening for women of color, for example, isn’t revealed by this data. And it’s just from one country.

It’s also quite short-term data, especially for one of those agencies. Longterm impacts will be critical for women in different circumstances, too – like the barriers faced by doctoral students with young children, for example. We can’t really breathe a very deep sigh of relief till we know how students and early career researchers fare.

In their review of the studies of the toll the pandemic took, Inguaggiato and co-authors stressed that academia needs to listen to women to improve the system’s “resilience and crisis preparedness.” We need to add to that everyone who has the cards stacked against them, regardless of gender. We need to double down a lot on efforts to remove all sorts of barriers to participation in science and society.

The Ginger Rogers metaphor reminds us to factor in that she had to do everything Fred Astaire did – but backwards, and in high heels. I don’t know what the metaphor is for everything being an order of magnitude harder than that in this pandemic. But we need to factor that in to an awful lot of people’s achievements these days, and celebrate their efforts and accomplishments accordingly.

You can keep up with my work at my newsletter, Living With Evidence. And I’m active on Mastodon: @hildabast@mastodon.online 

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The cartoon is my own (CC BY-NC-ND license). (More cartoons at Statistically Funny.)

Data table for percentage of grants awarded to women principal investigators (PIs) by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF)

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
NIH	34	35	36	38	39
NSF	31	32	34

Data sources:

NIH percentages from NIH Data Book Report 171 (January 2024)

NSF percentages calculated from Table 7, for the grants with PI gender reported, Merit Review Process Digest (June 2023)

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