International Women’s Day 2022 reading list

Happy International Women’s Day! I encourage you to join me in celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness against bias, and taking action for equality.

I am going to focus on women in academia today, since the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly difficult for female tenure track professors who have young children. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I need to continually take time to educate myself on the issues to be effective in my efforts for equality. Here are ten articles I have read recently that highlight the challenges that women academics face during the pandemic and outline policies and mitigating efforts that could help.

1. The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: a report from the National Academies in 2021. An article in Inside Higher Ed summarized the work of the panel that produced this report: COVID-19: A Moment for Women in STEM?
2. Pandemic-related barriers to the success of women in research: a framework for action, published in Nature in 2022.
3. Leveling the Field: Gender Inequity in Academia During COVID-19, published in PS: Political Science & Politics in 2021.
4. Faculty Evaluation After the Pandemic, published in The Chronicle in June 2021.
5. Could the Pandemic Prompt an ʻEpidemic of Lossʼ of Women in the Sciences? Published in the New York Times in April 2021.
6. A generation of junior faculty is at risk from the impacts of COVID-19, a perspective published in PLOS Biology in May 2021.
7. Only your boss can cure your burnout, published in the Atlantic in March 2021. This is not specifically about academia, and yet it has a lot of insight into academic careers.
8. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help, published in The Chronicle in February 2021.
9. The unequal impact of parenthood in academia, published in Science Advances in 2021
10. Ten simple rules for women principal investigators during a pandemic, published in PLOS Computational Biology in October 2020 (shout out to my UW-Madison colleagues Pam Kreeger and Kristyn Masters for publishing this paper)

I encourage you to read an article today and share it with others. Feel free to leave additional articles in the comments so I can continue to learn.