Gender differences in academia are well-known. Women publish less, achieve higher positions less frequently, and have more interrupted careers. Mothers, more than fathers or childless men and women, suffer these disadvantages. Women academics have to deal with the work-family conflict, the participation in both work and family roles are incompatibly demanding. The closure of childcare services and the impossibility to benefit from informal care (mainly via grandparents) made the pandemic a potential accelerator of these drawbacks for academic mothers. Academic work is basically incompatible with the everyday care of children. Analyzing in-depth interviews, in this article we show how mothers of young children had to reorganize their job priorities during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Moreover, we describe the perceived effects of the pandemic on their future career. We showed that the pandemic changed the priorities of academic mothers in a direction that is unfavorable to their careers: mothers devoted most of their time to teaching duties and stopped research. Moreover, they felt an increased gap in their relative competitiveness with male and childless colleagues.

This article captures mothers’ experiences of the work–family balance and division of household labor during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five academics and twenty professionals in other fields. Mothers who split childcare with their partners had a more positive experience of the work–family balance during lockdown, compared with mothers who did the majority of the childcare. The present study adds a new wrinkle into the literature on flexibility and work–family balance: the perception of flexibility and its impact on the division of labor. Academic mothers, who had always had highly “flexible” jobs, were less likely to split childcare with their partners pre-pandemic and thus less likely to have positive experiences of work–family balance during the Spring 2020 lockdown. I argue that perceived flexibility of a partner’s job affected allocation of childcare during the initial stages of the pandemic, a moment that wreaked significant harm on women’s careers.

Retail and demographic gentrification is well documented in the social sciences, but few studies have examined the impact of this process on a neighborhood's public spaces. This paper focuses on an annual street closure event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -a former working class neighborhood that is now attracting wealthy members of the upper class. 'Williamsburg Walks,' part of a New York City initiative, eliminates car traffic on the main commercial street for select summer weekends. Residents and visitors are encouraged to 'rethink' their use of the street during the closure. However merchants, residents, and event organizers each have different motives and expectations for 'Williamsburg Walks.' While the event aims to create more public space and 'a celebration of neighborhood,' it also serves an implicit goal of branding the neighborhood for the wealthy at the exclusion of long-term residents. I analyze 'Williamsburg Walks' in terms of a branding strategy using ethnographic data from the 2008-2010 events.

As the economies of production and trade have dwindled in Western cities, urban locales have had to capitalize on other opportunities for growth. Middle and upper class consumers are now sought after resources for cities and neighborhoods once supported by manufacturing. This article considers the role of local retail actors in shifting neighborhood identity towards luxury consumption. Important in this transformation is the process of theming by which business owners rely on cues from the neighborhood's identity and institutions, incorporate these cues into decisions for their own businesses, and thereby reify or change neighborhood identity. By tracing changes on shopping streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Manhattan's Lower East Side, I show how retail theming interacts with neighborhood identity. Interviews with storeowners and archival retail data illuminate how choices made by entrepreneurs or coporations contribute to dramatic aesthetic changes on the street. As the neighborhood identities change, existing long–term residents and less wealthy visitors become excluded from the local shopping streets and lose ownership over neighborhoods.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.