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This article forms part of the archives of Business Insider South Africa, which was published as a partnership between News24 and Insider Inc between 2018 and 2023.
- Male colleagues "sat on their hands" when lockdown hit, female university staff told researchers.
- The pressures of working from home led to panic attacks, burnout, lower productivity and at least one divorce, the resulting study reports.
- "The gendered nature of home workspaces" is a talent management issue for universities, researchers warn.
Hundreds of women academics have spoken out about the difficulties of working from home when the pandemic struck - and they say the men in their lives made things much harder.
Male colleagues “just sat on their hands” when something needed to be done and left it to women to volunteer, one academic told researchers.
And when domestic conflicts emerged over sharing space or household tasks, “in all such situations described by women with male partners, the change or compromise was always actively made by women academics”.
Researchers who analysed comments from 1,857 women at South Africa’s 26 universities add: “They were the ones to leave the room, change their schedules or seek alternatives, while their partners ‘got the study’.”
In the worst-case scenario, they say, the months couples spent in confinement, cohabitation and coworking damaged relationships.
In one of hundreds of comments submitted during the first six months of the Covid lockdown in 2020, an early career academic with a pre-school child told them: “It brought tension in the household and in time led to a deterioration of my relationship with my husband (soon to be ex-husband).”
The “gendered nature of home workspaces” should be a top-priority talent management issue for universities, say the four academics whose research into the lockdown experiences of female colleagues has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOSOne.
Women said they battled burnout, panic attacks and lower productivity as the boundaries between work and home became increasingly blurred, and an academic with two children said: “It became more of a living-at-work situation than a working-from-home situation.”
Another told researchers led by Stellenbosch University’s Prof Jonathan Jansen: “I feel like I cannot compartmentalise work from home any more … because of the constant guilt over whether I am doing enough on all fronts.”
Increased workloads linked to the admin involved in online teaching emerged as a key issue, and “many respondents observed the skewed distribution of this workload between male and female academics”, Jansen’s team says.
One academic wrote: “All the providers of online support with whom I worked, barring one, were women. All the people working overtime, late into the night, to prepare guides were women.
“The male colleagues I worked with did not read any of the support material, did not want to think how to adapt their assessment, made narrated PowerPoints and then expected the students to manage on their own.
“My perception is that when something needs to be done, the men just sit on their hands while we women volunteer, without even noticing that we are the ones always doing it.”
An academic with young children “even drew a direct parallel between the gendered nature of domestic work and the gendered nature of university work”, the researchers say.
She told them: “Women are not only carrying the burden of the nurturing of children and the housework at home, but when a crisis such as this comes along, male academics seem to get on with the important business of research, leaving women academics to nurture the students (child care) and do the admin (university housework).”
Congestion was a major problem for many of the women, who said their homes were fuller, noisier, teeming with activity and disorderly. “Even for those without children, [the home became] a confrontational arena in which difficult issues had to be addressed and from which there was no escape,” says the study.
Academics who are also mothers, however, struggled the most. One said: “Unlike my husband, I can’t just close the door and dissociate myself from the needs of the rest of the family.” The mother of two toddlers said: “I have a very involved husband, but when we have a clash it is the women’s work that suffers.”
Frustration over the loss of productivity “seemed compounded by the converse experience women observed in their male colleagues, and their fears for their professional future”, the researchers say.
An academic caring for a parent said: “I see myself and other women falling behind our male peers in the international arena, as our productivity has been lower. I anticipate that we will see this impact in future invitations to participate in conferences, international research projects and the like.”
The pressures they experienced left some of the women with mental health problems, with one “experienced scholar” telling the researchers: “I did suffer from panic attacks during this time.”
“I’ve been a bit sad, actually, to see how quickly my family casually renders me a servant when I am constantly around and not able to avail myself of the professional workspace,” another said.
Many academics said they coped by postponing any professional goals that were not essential, to give themselves time for household duties.
“As women deprioritised their academic work in this way, or alternatively attempted to meet every personal and professional goal, many found themselves either burnt out or stinging from a sense of failure to ‘do it all’,” says Jansen’s team.
“In either case, in the home women were subject to the ‘double burden’ of being a worker and a household manager, and reinforcing gender stereotypes about ‘women’s work’ and the value of women within their organisations.
“Importantly, this sense of women’s contributions in both the house/family and the professional field being undervalued lived within women as their sense of place blurred.”
Jansen’s female research partners were Cyrill Walters at Stellenbosch, Prof Linda Ronnie at the University of Cape Town and Samantha Kriger at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
