‘No less of a woman’: examining the (invisible) life of childfree women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship on gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academia has denounced how academic mothers’ research and teaching performance have been disproportionately disrupted compared to those of their male colleagues, given the generally unequal division of reproductive work. Gendered notions of motherhood remain central to conceptions of what women are, and motherhood is regularly portrayed as the main hindrance to academic women’s careers. However, little is known about the experiences of childfree women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews with childfree women in academia about how they navigated the transformations brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper argues that the perception of childfree women as the ideal worker and a gendered conceptualization of work-life balance have rendered childfree academic women’s hardships invisible. This article concludes that, contrary to the idea that childfree women academics were unencumbered during the COVID-19 pandemic, these women faced various struggles that significantly affected their emotional well-being and availability for work. The evidence underlines the importance of studying childfree women academics to disentangle the complexity of women’s experiences in neoliberal academia.