Anzahl der Publikationen von männlichen Forschern in der Coronazeit erheblich gestiegen, kein Anstieg bei den Frauen

Eine interessante Meldung zeigt, dass viele Männer anscheinend die Coronazeit und den jeweiligen Lockdown in ihrem Land genutzt haben um wissenschaftliche Artikel zu schreiben: (Danke für den Hinweis)

Six weeks into widespread self-quarantine, editors of academic journals have started noticing a trend: Women — who inevitably shoulder a greater share of family responsibilities — seem to be submitting fewer papers.

Ich hatte hier schon einmal Susan Pinker mit der Aussage zitiert:

„Frauen kommen aus der Elternzeit mit einem Rückstand, Männer mit einem neuen Buch“

Und das zeigt jetzt eben auch hier in der Coronazeit. Ein Teil der Männer geben die Kinderbetreuung eher ab und widmen sich ihrer Karriere, was sicherlich auch genug Ehefrauen unterstützen, denn es kommt ihnen ja direkt zugute.

This threatens to derail the careers of women in academia, says Leslie Gonzales, a professor of education administration at Michigan State University, who focuses on strategies for diversifying the academic field: When institutions are deciding who to grant tenure to, how will they evaluate a candidate’s accomplishments during coronavirus?

“We don’t want a committee to look at the outlier productivity of, say, a white hetero man with a spouse at home and say, ‘Well, this person managed it,’” says Gonzales. “We don’t want to make that our benchmark.”

Sie wollen also nicht den (weißen) heterosexuelle Mann mit Ehefrau zum Standard machen, nach dem Leistungen zu erbringen sind. Was die Hautfarbe damit zu tun hätte wäre interessant, aber es ist wahrscheinlich nur der Ideologie geschuldet.

Die Frage wäre, wie sie das vermeiden wollen. Den eine Quote oder eine Bevorzugung für Leute, die sich weniger reinknien, weil sie mehr Zeit mit ihren Kindern wollen, wäre ja auch nicht gerade fair (und auch schwer überprüfbar)

Astrophysics is one field in which covid-19 seems to be having a disproportionate effect on female academics, said Andy Casey, an astrophysics research fellow at Monash University who analyzed the number of submissions to astrophysics “preprint servers,” where academics typically post early versions of their papers. For The Lily, Casey compared data from January to April in 2020 to the same time period in previous years, noting “perhaps up to 50 percent more productivity loss among women.” Especially because women are already underrepresented in astrophysics, Casey said, the drop off has been easy for editors to spot.

Editors in other fields have noticed the same thing. Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, said the numbers were unlike anything she’d seen before.

While Comparative Political Studies, a journal that publishes 14 times a year, received the same number of submissions from women this year and last year, the number of submissions from men has increased more than 50 percent, according to co-editor David Samuels. Other journals have only seen a dip in the number of solo-authored papers submitted by women: Submissions are stable for women working as part of a team.

Also ganz erhebliche Unterschiede, die ja letztendlich bestätigen, dass Männer karriereorientierter sind und sich da mehr Freiräume schaffen. Es wäre interessant einmal zu untersuchen, wie viele davon verheiratet mit Kindern sind bzw Single ohne Kinder etc und dies auch mit dem entsprechenden Status bei Frauen zu vergleichen.

This evidence is anecdotal: Some journals say they’ve seen no change, or are receiving comparatively more submissions from women since self-quarantine began. But the anecdotes are consistent with broader patterns in academia, says Gonzales: If men and women are at home, men “find a way” to do more academic work.
When men take advantage of “stop the clock” policies, taking a year off the tenure-track after having a baby, studies show they’ll accomplish far more professionally than their female colleagues, who tend to spend that time focused primarily or solely on child care.

Das ist auch genau das, was Susan Pinker beschreibt. Ich zitiere es noch einmal aus ihrem Buch:

„…One might expect that men married to female university professors would be more likely to have egalitarian views and share child care equally, but this is another myth. Steven Rhoads, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, had similar assumptions. He ran a nationwide study and found that 75 percent of female faculty believed their husbands should take on equal amounts of child care, housework, and paid work. Just over half of their husbands agreed. Yet the women spent much more time with their children than their husbands did, and in universities where they were offered paid parental leave, 67 percent of the eligible women took advantage of it, only 12 percent of male faculty took that time off, and when they did, they didn’t use the time the same way. ‚We heard stories of male academics who took paid post-birth leave in order to advance their publishing agendas,‘ wrote Rhoads, commenting that he’d heard of one school that changed its rules as a result. Upon returning from her maternity leave, one female colleague recalled being asked by a male colleague how the leave had gone. She replied, ‚I used the time well.‘ Then the man said, ‚So you got a lot of work done.‘ But that’s not what she meant.

„If more academic mothers use a leave to spend time with their baby and more new fathers use the time to publish, then a system based on men and women being identical ends up punishing women. When these family-friendly policies are applied equally to both sexes, academic women experience more discrimination, not less. One unofficial study at an Ivy league college found that parental leave benefits available to both sexes had that paradoxical effect: no woman who had taken a family leave in the previous fifteen years had subsequently received tenure. Most if not all of the small number of men who had taken family leave did. This was never published or even tallied up as a real study, but it became commonly cited during the tenure discussion, summarized as ‚a woman takes family leave and comes back with a backlog, a man takes family leave and comes back with a book’… Realizing what was happening, a committee at the college tweaked the policy to allow additional leave for those who give birth (obviously, fathers wouldn’t be eligible). This helped… [N]o one wanted to discuss the issue openly, allow the college to be named, or be identified in any way. The topic was taboo…“

„Stop the Clock“ war vorgesehen als eine Hilfe für Frauen, ein Instrument der Chancengleichheit, das ihnen helfen sollte nach der Geburt eines Kindes auszusetzen. Es scheint aber eher Männern zu helfen:

• Unintended Help for Male Professors
• Stop the clock: Tenure, gender, and children

Aber weiter in dem Artikel. Es wird dann dargestellt, wie schwierig es für eine Forscherin war, weil sie eben neben dem Job noch die Kinder hatte. Sie schlägt dann am Ende folgende Regelung vor:

For the next few years, there should be a letter added to every tenure application, Gonzales says, instructing readers to consider how the “fallout [from coronavirus] has very different effects across gender and race.” Evaluators should consider each applicant’s individual set of circumstances, she said.
“We essentially want to say, ‘Hey, this was a big deal for a lot of people.’” If someone didn’t finish all three papers she’d been expecting to write, maybe that’s okay.
Lev has started to keep track of her days, writing down how many hours she spent with her daughter, and how many hours she was able to work.
If anyone ever says she wasn’t “productive” during coronavirus, she’ll have the records to prove them wrong.

Wären aus meiner Sicht dann eher sachfremde Erwägungen, wenn der andere schlicht besser ist und es bliebe auch sehr unklar wie man „Zeit mit den Kindern“ bewerten soll. Was genau soll das letztendlich aufwiegen und in welchem Umfang? Und wie soll man es kontrollieren und damit objektivieren? Es kann ja auch jeder Mann, der alles an seine Ehefrau abgegeben hat, anführen, dass er mit den Kindern gespielt hat und Abends dennoch die 5 Artikel geschrieben hat.

Letztendlich scheinen sie mir damit einen schlichten Frauenbonus haben zu wollen. Carearbeit als Studienarbeit.