Measuring Social Sustainability during COVID-19

(photo taken from https://newsroom.iza.org/en/archive/research/telework-increases-employees-stress-levels/)

The other day I was browsing Facebook and sipping a cup of coffee, as I have done most mornings since the stay-at-home orders began, and I was struck by a headline I saw shared by a friend: "Early journal submission data suggest COVID-19 is tanking women's research productivity." While this certainly wasn't the first piece about gender inequality during COVID-19 that I've seen being shared around social media, I had just happened to come across this one while finally beginning to process the ways in which my own research, courses, summer intensives, and conferences had been affected, if not cancelled. With a twinge of disappointment, I clicked... and I read.

This article from Inside Higher Ed explains what many of us fellow women in academia knew was coming: as life moves rapidly back into the home, women researchers are no longer researching. They can't.

On Monday, the American Journal of Political Science released a longer-term analysis of submissions and publications by both men and women over the last three years. They expressed that "this was part of a larger effort to understand publication patterns for authors from underrepresented groups." While examining the last couple of weeks, they measured an increase in submissions, expressing that 33% of submitting authors have been women compared to the long-term results of 25%. However, they also found that most of these submissions did not feature women as solo authors, as women authors only accounted for 8 of the 46 submissions. From a sustainability standpoint, it is not out of the question for us to infer that something about women's lifestyles during COVID-19 is even more unsustainable than it was prior.

It doesn't take a degree in women's studies to understand this. Men and women have had different circumstances in the home for a very long time. That isn't to say that men's productivity isn't also being affected - it is. But the shift in work-life balance in an already unequal system has only worsened the divide. This is where I would argue that women's productivity has not gone down, it has just changed from things our patriarchal society recognizes and views as measurable, to more labor that occurs in the home and is not considered economic. A social sustainability lens gives us much here to question about the ways in which we measure the worth and productivity of women's lives - especially for those of us fighting to restore our lives in a way that is much more sustainable than before.