Early analyses discussed in a recent article in Nature (10.1038/d41586-020-01294-9) suggest that female academics are posting fewer preprints and starting fewer research projects than their male peers.

COVID-19 is changing the way research is done. World-wide lockdowns mean that, overnight, many households worldwide have become an intersection of work, school, and home life. The new mechanisms of accelerated peer review, the increased quantity and speed of available data, and the distribution of funding across sectors are changing the equilibria of the academic world. We therefore need to pay attention to the effects this has on disparities. What happens when a couple is at home? Is it exacerbating gender inequality? In a commentary in Nature (doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-01135-9) very early during the pandemic, Alessandra Minello suggested it is disproportionately affecting the productivity of female academics, because they often do more caregiving than men.

Megan Frederickson, an ecologist at the University of Toronto being COVID-19-quarantined herself, looked at preprint servers to investigate whether women were posting fewer studies than they were before lockdowns began (https://github.com/drfreder/pandemic-pub-bias/blob/master/README.md). Peer review takes time, it is still too soon to see COVID-19’s effects on the numbers of journal articles published by female versus male academics. However, a growing number of academics make their submitted or in-progress manuscripts available on preprint servers, meaning it might be possible to measure the pandemic’s effect on preprint submissions in real time. She looked at arXiv (physical sciences), and bioRxiv (life sciences) to determine the gender of studies posted between March 15 and April 15 in 2019 and in 2020. The number of women who authored preprints at arXiv increased by 2.7% from 2019 to 2020 — but the number of male authors grew by 6.4% over the same period. The numbers for bioRxiv were 24.2% vs. 26%. A similar trend was found in a separate study including nine popular preprint servers (https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/decline-women-scientist-research-publishing-production-coronavirus-pandemic). Thus, women’s publishing rate has fallen relative to men’s amid the pandemic.

In another study by the information scientist Cassidy Sugimoto at Indiana University Bloomington on three registered-report repositories including ClinicalTrial.gov, there was a decrease in the proportion of submissions by female principal investigators from March and April of 2019 to the same months in 2020, when lockdowns started. Hence, women are registering a smaller proportion of new research projects than before the pandemic.

What are the likely causes for this effect? Increased household labor and childcare responsibility are probably the major reasons. Also, women more often take care of ailing relatives. The sudden shift to online teaching might mean more work for women as they in average probably have more teaching commitments than men, while the shutdown of the universities might free more time for men to write papers as they more often have non-research commitments.

What can be done to mitigate this effect? Our scientific environment requires the participation of all members of the population; a crisis requires that we draw from the intellect of the full population. As the effects and the pandemic are likely to linger, we must consider how our evaluation systems and resource allocation mechanisms take into account the inequities in labor distribution for women. We need to create infrastructures to allow for all populations to participate, and to acknowledge systematic differences in their ability to do so.

Enjoy your week-end!

Up till now, the government has had a strategy to knock down the corona virus. The spread of the infection is now under control, and yesterday the government announced that they are now switching to a control strategy. The goal is still the same as before, that our health service should have the capacity to help everyone who needs it, those with coronary illness and those with other illnesses. This means that businesses and activities must still take infection control measures when they open up.

In recent weeks, K2 has opened something up – from only allowing exceptions for critical functions to exceptions essential for those completing a degree in 2020 or to generate preliminary data for research applications or particularly costly or critical experiments. At the time of writing, we do not know how much of our activity K2 can open in the next few weeks. The government proposes that distance education should continue to be the norm after May 11, and those in need of collective travel to work should still have a home office. Presently, we do not know whether there will be new reliefs for the laboratories. When we have received new guidance from the Faculty, we will announce the new guidelines through the research group leaders.

Of course, there is great eagerness to get back to normal life at K2. I’m very happy about that. But it is important to remember that the ongoing opening up can give the impression that the outbreak of the virus is about to go over. Unfortunately, it is not. As we gradually reduce the restrictions, it requires that we still keep control of the infection. At K2, we must continue with the simple measures that we know is working and have few negative consequences: be careful about hand washing and cough hygiene, keep at least one meter distance, and stay home when you are sick.

Enjoy the (hopefully corona-free) weekend!

Now it has been nearly 7 weeks since UiB was closed due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Most of us are still obliged to use home-office. Since Monday 27/4, some more people have been allowed back in the labs. However, it is still an exception that you get access!

Remember that it is the research group leader who has to send a list of who should have access to me (including risk assessment and confirmation of passed infection control course), and then Pål as head of department decides who gets access. And then of course, there are the infection control and hygiene rules when you are at work, so it takes some organization to avoid too many people at the same time in smaller rooms. A big thank you to all those who help make it work in these times!

I would also like to remind PhD fellows who have been delayed in their progress because of home-office during the Corona period to make a written description of the delay and let the supervisor confirm this. The documentation has to be sent to the faculty administration by e-mail:  hrmed@uib.no, mark with Korona in the subject line. This documentation will be entered into the personnel folder of the individual and may form the basis for an extension of the appointment period if necessary.

Finally, I wish you all a nice International Worker’s day and a good weekend!