Impact of COVID-19 lockdown in a biomedical research campus: A gender perspective analysis

Abstract

From March to September 2020, researchers working at a biomedical scientific campus in Spain faced two lockdowns and various mobility restrictions that affected their social and professional lifestyles. The working group “Women in Science,” which acts as an independent observatory of scientific gender inequalities on campus launched an online survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on scientific activity, domestic and caregiving tasks, and psychological status. The survey revealed differences in scientific performance by gender: while male researchers participated in a larger number of scientific activities for career development, female researchers performed more invisible scientific tasks, including peer review or outreach activities. Mental impact was greater in researchers caring for children or dependents, and this was aggravated for women. Results spot a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on female scientific career development, and urges for equity measures to mitigate the consequences of an increase in the gender gap in biomedical sciences for current and future pandemics.

Leveraging Social Media Data for Unobtrusive Measurement of Academics’ Well-Being

“…Insights from the Dutch DJA-LNVH survey illustrate that female researchers, especially those with responsibilities for young children, are in a more precarious career phase than their male colleagues and experience more stress regarding their research progress and future in science (LNVH, 2021). The prevailing scientific literature aligns with these findings, indicating that female researchers, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, have been more severely affected by the pandemic (Harper et al, 2020;Izquierdo-Useros et al, 2022;KNAW, 2022;Sohrabi et al, 2021). This trend, highlighting a gender-specific differentiation in the impacts of the pandemic on the scientific community, should also be reflected in our results derived from tweets, leading to our second hypothesis: H2: The effect (H1) is significantly stronger for female researchers than for male researchers…”