As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolds, a growing body of international literature is analyzing the effects of the pandemic on academic labor and, specifically, on gender inequalities in academia. In that literature, much attention has been devoted to comparing the unequal impacts of COVID‐19 on the research activities of women and men, with studies demonstrating that women's research productivity has been disproportionately disrupted, in ways that are likely to have detrimental effects in the short‐ and long‐term. In this paper, I discuss that emerging literature on gender inequalities in pandemic academic productivity. I reflect on the questions asked, the issues centered and the assumptions made within this literature, devoting particular attention to how authors conceptualize academic labor and productivity, on one hand, and gender, on the other. I show that this literature makes major contributions to exposing old and new gender inequalities in academia, but argue that it also risks reproducing some problematic assumptions about gender and about academic work. Discussing those assumptions and their effects, I identify some important questions for us to consider as we expand this literature and deepen our understanding of the complex gendered effects of COVID‐19 on academic labor.

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This article explores some of the most significant questions in feminist epistemology: how do academics demarcate what constitutes 'proper' academic knowledge? And to what extent is feminist theory and research recognised as such? I draw on material from an ethnographic study of academia in Portugal to examine the claims that non-feminist scholars make in classrooms and conferences about the epistemic status of feminist scholarship. I observed that feminist work was very commonly described as capable of generating credible and valuable knowledge, but only in some instances and in limited ways. I present examples of these adversative claims (i.e. propositions that express opposition or discrepancy through a 'but' or equivalent adversative conjunction) and analyse their structure, content and uses of caricature and humour, showing how epistemic boundaries are drawn in them and how feminist scholarship is positioned in relation to those boundaries. I argue that this boundary-work produces a representation of feminist scholarship as being located partly within, and partly outside, the realm of proper knowledge, a move which I designate as an epistemic splitting of that scholarship. I suggest that this splitting enables and legitimates a selective engagement with feminist work, because it provides non-feminist scholars with a recognised epistemological rationale for taking into account the feminist insights which broadly fit mainstream frameworks, while simultaneously rejecting as epistemologically unsound the feminist critiques of those frameworks.

Analyses of contemporary transformations in higher education and research funding indicate that such transformations impact not just on labour conditions and processes of knowledge production, but also on demarcations of what counts as 'proper' knowledge. As universities in many countries see their core funding reduced, profitability gains importance as a criterion of knowledge evaluation, sometimes producing sudden changes in long-standing discourses about the relative value of disciplines. This article examines how funding changes (re)shape epistemic hierarchies, drawing on an ethnography of academia in Portugal and using women's, gender and feminist studies (WGFS) as a case study. I show that amidst significant cutbacks, the recognition that feminist scholarship has financial value discourages questioning of its epistemic value, a questioning common until recently. Yet, this change is described publicly as motivated only by epistemic factors. Thus, I analyse interviews and speeches to examine how links between pecuniary profitability and epistemic status are downplayed to maintain a discursive framing of universities as institutions concerned with knowledge, rather than profit.