So perhaps it’s no surprise that large-scale disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic can have an even bigger impact. A study showed, for example, that the increase in childcare duties due to the closure of daycare centers and schools during the pandemic reduced the time female scientists with young children could devote to their research by 30 to 40 percent.
Even in normal times, women—who disproportionately serve as caregivers in American society—are often underrepresented in upward or outward fields. So when the pandemic hit, many worried that the disruption could reshape the makeup of these professions. In response to this concern, many higher education institutions have introduced the Covid-19 Impact Statement – a document in which faculty being considered for tenure have the opportunity to explain how the pandemic has affected their productivity.
But not everyone was convinced that the Covid-19 Impact Statement would be an unmitigated boon for equality in the workplace.
“People were talking about how the solution might be these impact statements, but as a researcher who studies the expression—or disruption—of bias, I was really concerned,” he says. Lauren Riveraprofessor of management and operations at Kellogg. After all, can highlighting someone’s caregiving responsibilities possibly reinforce the idea that they are less committed to their work?
Rivera partnered with Northwestern’s Catherine Weissardassociate professor of sociology and the University of Toronto András Tilcsik to explore how these Covid-19 impact statements were perceived. To test the tool, the researchers evaluated the results of a prototype survey experiment completed by more than 600 teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with an emphasis on the biological and natural sciences.
They found that the Covid-19 impact statement could, in fact, help level the playing field for carers in academia. They also confirmed that it does not seems to cause bias in the way Rivera believed. Instead, the tool sheds light on the ways in which personal narratives, and how they are contextualized, can help eliminate bias.
“We know from other industries that the stories we tell matter and affect how people see us,” says Rivera. “And what we show in this paper is that they are powerful tools that can be used, in the right circumstances, to increase equality.”
Comparison of work disorders
Rivera was well placed to explore the nuances of the Covid-19 impact statement and similar tools. Through her research, she has long analyzed the ways in which workplaces assess value—and how these assessments can perpetuate social inequalities. He knew well, for example, the past research This has shown how disclosure of information about caring responsibilities can fail.
“We’ve seen that in professional occupations in the US, and in academic science in particular, there’s a stigma against anything in your life that isn’t a total dedication to science and work,” he says.
The researchers chose to disseminate their research among faculty in STEM disciplines in large part because those fields tend to require research work in labs, many of which were closed next to child care centers and schools during the pandemic. In the context of Rivera and her colleagues’ study, these closed labs were crucial because they allowed the researchers to compare caregiving challenges with an entirely different kind of productivity disruption.
This comparison became a central part of the experimental research design. First, the STEM teachers who responded to the researchers’ survey read a tenure application from a fictional assistant professor candidate. The candidate’s profile was intentionally designed to read as “on the edge,” Rivera says—potentially ready for office, but not necessarily. The fictitious application noted that the applicant had been allowed to submit a Covid-19 impact statement with their application.
The faculty who responded to the survey were then asked to weigh in: Should this candidate be given tenure?
The researchers distributed three slightly modified versions of the profile in their study. In one version, the applicant did not include an impact statement. In another, they included a statement describing a child care interruption. and in a third version, they included a statement about a laboratory interruption. The researchers also varied the applicant’s perceived gender by changing their name: some of the applications featured a candidate named Jennifer Nelson. others, Michael Nelson.
The survey also asked a few additional questions, asking faculty to rate the candidate’s current and future productivity, the candidate’s job commitment relative to similar faculty members, and the extent to which they would support the candidate’s tenure if the committee disagreed over the decision. There was also an open answer section where teachers could offer more extensive explanations for their decisions.
“One of the reasons we included the open-ended section is because, in a survey, you can administer various measures, but you’re making assumptions about what matters to people,” says Rivera. “We wanted to include a space where respondents could express their own reasoning and capture things that we, as researchers, might not have expected.”
Making a statement
Overall, a clear pattern emerged: the inclusion of any Covid-19 impact statement yielded significantly more positive tenure recommendations compared to applications without the statement.
The professors rated the fictional candidates on a scale from 1 (“definitely not promoting”) to 6 (“definitely promoting”). On average, undeclared candidates received a score of 4.54, between “probably promoted” and “probably promoted”. However, candidates who included a statement describing the workshop closure received a higher mean score of 4.73, and those who included a statement about the childcare closure received a mean score of 4.87. There was a statistically significant difference between the scores of candidates with a statement compared to those without a statement, but not between the different types of statements. A care-related disruption, in other words, was deemed just as justified as closing a lab.
The same patterns apply regardless of the gender of the candidates.
Likewise, the survey’s follow-up questions did not produce significantly different results for the two types of statements, as the researchers had initially suspected they might. “It is possible that a Covid-19 statement detailing extensive childcare responsibilities could yield a more favorable tenure recommendation but create a more negative perception of a faculty member’s long-term research trajectory or commitment to science,” they write researchers in the paper. . But in the end, their results revealed almost the opposite.
Indeed, the researchers found that, in the open-ended section, professors ended up using similar, understandable language when describing their decision to grant tenure to candidates with an impact statement. They emphasized that the pandemic was now “in the past” and that the disruption it had caused was “legitimate”. They also pointed out that the problems it caused were “outside the candidates’ control” and were “external” to those candidates.
“It was almost as if this particular cognitive framework allowed people to interpret the presence of the disorder in a way that didn’t activate care and gender biases,” says Rivera.
The stories we tell
Rivera and her colleagues continue to investigate the effects that framing hardship and disruption as temporary factors outside of one’s control can have in the workplace.
They plan to look beyond Covid-19 impact statements and into a wider variety of settings, with the following question in mind: “Under what conditions do the stories we tell about these disorders level the playing field—or tilt the playing field more? space?”
