Viewpoint: Visibilising Care in the Academy: (Re)Performing Academic Mothering in the Transformative Moment of COVID‐19

Abstract

The effects of COVID‐19 have been profoundly felt across higher education as across broader society. In particular, the pandemic has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. In this article, we adopt a maternal epistemology and collaborative witnessing to outline the disruption that academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic. However, we argue that this disruption is not simply obstructive to academic mothers and other caregivers. Rather, COVID‐19 has provided a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of care in the academy. It has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers must constantly manage into the spotlight. The pandemic has provoked an opportunity for a different performance of mothering in the academy; one that does not require us to invisibilise our care to be valued. This (re)performance and revaluation has the potential to reform the cultural landscapes of the academy, towards spaces in which care is reimagined as not simply an encumberment but also an enrichment.

Thank you for your email. Due to the hard lockdown, universities and schools are closed. I am working at home and my ability to check emails is limited due to parenting responsibilities. Thank you for your patience during this unusual time. ¹

The COVID‐19 pandemic has ruptured our global social fabric. The effects of the pandemic are of a magnitude that many of us, at least in the Western industrialised world, have not hitherto experienced in this lifetime. Caregivers across the globe have been impacted by COVID‐19, those caring for elderly people and people with disabilities as well as those caring for children. Parents have been particularly hard hit as childcare centres, kindergartens and schools have been closed during lockdowns, forcing children's learning and care back into the home. This form of ‘imposed volunteering’ has disproportionately impacted women, with mothers (and pregnant women) much more likely to suffer adverse effects on employment, relationships and wellbeing. ² Mothers have been dubbed the ‘invisible frontline workers’ of the pandemic. ³ In this, the gendered impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic echoes well‐established patterns of previous disasters and are expected to linger long term. ⁴

Such trends have been discernible within academia as well. COVID‐19 has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. As more women have chosen not to mother and we enter an era of ‘post‐patriarchal motherhood’, it has become apparent that many of the inequalities in academia are experienced by those doubly disadvantaged by their gender and caring role: mothers. ⁵ Indeed, gender asymmetries within higher education are often unique to women who mother, with universities reproducing dehumanising relations between mother and academic subjectivities and othering mothers, but also functioning more insidiously to invisibilise mothering. ⁶ We have chosen not to focus here on parents, or on caregivers more broadly, because the experiences of mothers are distinctive due to this double disadvantage. Nevertheless, maternal experiences during the pandemic have relevance for the experiences of caregivers more broadly, as we shall see.

Negative impacts on academic productivity have been worse for women with caregiving responsibilities. ⁷ For academic mothers, both paid and unpaid emotional labour has increased, with students as well as children requiring additional care in difficult times. ⁸ The kind of deep thinking required for research and writing has been near impossible amid this increased care load, with the impacts of impeded research expected to endure for years. ⁹

Academic Sarah Knott evocatively articulated the challenges she faced due to COVID‐19:

The children are growing, asleep downstairs. I write, hastily, ahead of waking's interruption, before the next ‘school day’ and ‘teaching day’ together at home. Short sentences, short paragraphs, land more quickly during this strange new pandemic dependence. ¹⁰

Knott's account brings to the surface the new challenges that almost all academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic: an unbinding of spatial and temporal boundaries, a discontinuity of academic and mother work and an intensification of the rapidity that is central to our everyday experience as academic mothers. In our work as academics, we have transitioned to remote learning, our research resources have been minimised and the time required to perform our academic work has been reduced. In our work as mothers, we have home‐schooled our children and experienced the significant and compounding effects of COVID‐19 on our care work and domestic labour. This has been no small feat. The automated email response that appears at the beginning of this article is an increasingly standard signal used by academic mothers to alert others to what has become a daily struggle during the pandemic.

In this article, we aim to provide some nuance in the scholarly discourse surrounding the impact of the pandemic on academic mothers. While there is no doubt that COVID‐19 has increased the public and private burdens of academic mothers, we suggest that it has also provided us with a potentially transformative moment. It has surfaced and visibilised the double burden that sociologists have decried as placing impossible, irreconcilable demands on mothers in modern, industrialised societies. ¹¹ This visibility is palpable for academic mothers whose experience is most often shrouded in patriarchy and neo‐liberalism and characterised by a silencing of mothering through disembodied vocationalism. ¹² The question is then: what effect has this increased visibility had on academic mothers who work within organisations simultaneously characterised by often progressive individual understandings of gender, but also notoriously demanding cultures of overwork?

To answer this question, we discuss recent research with Australian academic mothers, focusing first on the experiences of mothering in the academy prior to the pandemic, then moving on to describe the experiences of mothering during the pandemic. ¹³ While, by and large, we take up scholarly voice in the article, we align ourselves with Knott's more radical form of writing that does away with the distanced narrator. We use our own experiences as mothers in the academy and, following Knott, we ‘ask our readers to come along too’, as we show that a different performance of mothering is possible: a (re)performance that does not adhere to the masculinised disembodied worker and that does not require us to invisibilise our maternal selves to be valued in the academy. ¹⁴ Our use of the concept ‘(re)performance’ is informed by Judith Butler's feminist work on gender performance, where performativity is not a singular deliberate act, but a ‘reiterative practice by which discourse produces the effects it names’. ¹⁵ (Re)performing becomes a site of resisting the normative performance and of positive re‐invention of the self. Our use of the concept ‘visibilise’ stems broadly from Foucault's work on the gaze and visibilisation, which is not just about ‘being seen’, but about the interplay between the gaze and power. ¹⁶ As we take it, the concept is specifically embedded in the social theory of Brighenti, for whom visibility constitutes a sort of social optics, a relational and strategic space involving seeing and being seen and the manipulation of visibility by subjects in order to obtain real social effects. ¹⁷ In this article, we focus on the visibilising of mothers as a point of recognition and struggle that works to reshape pre‐existing visibilities. Theoretically, our article is also inspired by Anthony Giddens’ concept of a ‘critical situation’: the onset of a disruptive event that prompts us to ‘learn a good deal about day‐to‐day life in routine settings from analysing circumstances in which those settings are radically disturbed’. ¹⁸ For us, Giddens’ idea of a critical situation is one that transcends theoretical alignment with structuralism and has indeed been reimagined by others, especially Michael Bury in his seminal work on ‘biographical disruption’. ¹⁹ As the article unfolds, our central thesis – that COVID‐19 provides a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of mothering in the academy – owes a debt also to Simon Williams’ post‐modern work on corporeal transgression and positive re‐inventions of the self. ²⁰

Conceptual framings: mothers, work and feminism

The impacts of the pandemic upon academic mothers have emerged within a wider historical context and theoretical framing of maternal workloads. Feminist economic and political theorists such as Sylvia Federici and Marilyn Waring have critiqued capitalism as a fundamentally gendered and unjust economic system in which the paid forms of work that are ‘counted’ and waged rest upon enormous quantities of unpaid domestic and care work, that Federici terms ‘reproductive labour’. ²¹ Despite the essential role of unpaid work in providing the foundations for paid work, its existence and worth is regularly erased. In this article, we refer to two types of unpaid work that women customarily perform: domestic work (including meal preparation, house cleaning and clothes washing) and care work (primarily the care of children but also the emotional labour of keeping families psychologically well and the ‘organisational labour’ of coordinating different roles within families). ²² This article focuses on unpaid care and domestic work performed by academic mothers, but it references the ways that the removal of paid care options has heightened this load.

One of feminism's key projects has been to remove barriers to women's public sphere participation. But as female participation in paid work has increased in industrialised societies since the mid‐twentieth century, there have been two major consequences for unpaid work. First, the unpaid workloads of women in the home have remained disproportionate to those of men. Women have increasingly shouldered a double burden, adding paid work to their substantial unpaid workload. ²³ Second, unpaid work has increasingly been outsourced, to childcare providers, house cleaners, nannies and others. Such work is usually performed by women of socio‐economic disadvantage and culturally diverse backgrounds and remains low status and low pay. One of the effects of the pandemic has been women's inability to outsource care work – in its paid forms but also to grandparents and friends – meaning that care work has been forced back onto women and into the home. ²⁴ This highlights two key, unresolved issues. First, care work is still inadequately appreciated and remunerated in all forms. Second, there are still gendered asymmetries in who performs unpaid care work in the home. ²⁵

As women's paid workforce participation has increased, several critiques of mainstream feminism have arisen simultaneously. One is that it has often failed to diversify the category of ‘woman’. Intersectional feminism calls for attention to the ways in which race, class, ability status and sexuality complicate the experiences of women. ²⁶ Additionally, some claim that feminism has been co‐opted by capitalism, leading to a version of neoliberal feminism or corporate feminism. ²⁷ Viewed from the vantage point of a global pandemic, it increasingly feels like feminism has not achieved nearly enough over the past half‐century, and those gains that have been made are rapidly being eroded. This article argues for a feminism in which women's work counts for something and is both equally shared and suitably valued. But it also argues for a feminist conceptualisation of mothering as more than a burden and a cost. This is an understanding of care that values not only what care offers the cared‐for and wider society, but also how it enriches the caregiver. This is part of the promise of matricentric, or maternal, feminism. ²⁸

We characterise our methodologies and analytical frameworks for this article as a ‘maternal epistemology’. Both authors have been working and caring as academic mothers during COVID‐19, living through the unrealistic and competing demands that we describe. Often during pre‐pandemic times, our maternal subjectivities have been, of necessity, obscured behind our academic personae. But in this instance, we felt it important that we surface them. Our research for, and writing of, this article is a form of relational autoethnography, or what Knott refers to as ‘presencing’: bringing to the surface the relationship of our personal subjectivities to the subject matter of our research through biographical accounts. ²⁹ It is also akin to what ethnographer Carolyn Ellis refers to as ‘collaborative witnessing’, which she argues ‘extends an autoethnographic perspective in its emphasis on writing for and with the other, listening and working together with care and compassion, and bearing witness to others as well as to oneself’. ³⁰ In this article, we have striven to not only explicitly inhabit our own maternal subjectivity, but to also bear witness to the experiences of other academic mothers.

Sociologist Emilee Gilbert has been living in the Australian state of New South Wales, which experienced the highest national rates of coronavirus in 2020 followed by an extended period of lockdown in 2021 lasting 104 days. During these periods, her seven‐year‐old son and five‐year‐old boy/girl twins required home‐schooling, with the ages of the children limiting their capacity for independent learning. Working full time as an academic, Gilbert and her partner – who also works full time – set out to divide and conquer, though in reality it was more a case of divide and survive. Gilbert's teaching was shifted entirely online within the space of a week, her sabbatical was postponed, her research interviews moved from face‐to‐face to zoom, online academic meetings increased as staff scrambled to find solutions to pandemic problems, student supervision became remote and isolation from colleagues was heavily felt. Coinciding with this was an unexpectedly demanding kindergarten and Grade Two curriculum: Gilbert found herself teaching history, mathematics, reading, writing, spelling, music, science, art and crafts, as well as engaging the children in ‘cosmic yoga’, sport and daily mindfulness.

Despite the chaos, Gilbert was intent on completing a project which examined academic mothers’ experiences of negotiating work and family. Gilbert began the project with colleagues in 2019, when she returned to work after an almost continuous four‐year ‘career interruption’ following the births of her children. The project was a kind of catharsis for Gilbert, recently living the experience of being a mother in the academy, especially the experience of suffering the immense penalties that follow a return to work after maternity leave. The project involved focus groups as well as surveys with academic mothers from public universities across Australia. Focus groups were carried out in 2019 pre‐COVID‐19 and in 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic. The survey was administered only during 2019. Many of the mothers who took part in the 2019 focus groups also took part in the 2020 pandemic focus groups. ³¹

The 2020 pandemic focus groups took place during the early months of COVID‐19, before ‘covid fatigue’ had set in. During these focus groups, there was an awareness that women's mothering identities and performances were subject to recent change as universities and academics found themselves continually responding to shifts in the pandemic landscape, the introduction of new public health measures, new lockdowns and restrictions, the realities of redundancies and working from home. These focus groups largely centred on the experiences of managing academia and mothering since the onset of the pandemic. ³²

For many of the academic mothers, the focus groups were a form of ‘group therapy’. Informed by the idea of collaborative witnessing, the focus groups were not simply a process of Gilbert taking responsibility for asking questions. Rather, they were an experience where Gilbert and the women collaboratively engaged in telling stories about shared experiences. In this sense, Gilbert was a witness to the testimonies of the women's realities. As one of this article's reviewers pointed out, ‘speaking your truth, telling your story, and having it heard and honoured’ is an important way for the women to bring their stories forward. In interpreting the accounts of the academic mothers, Gilbert's intention – drawing on Catherine Kohler Riessman's work – has been to ‘do justice’ to them. ³³

Historian Carla Pascoe Leahy has resided in the state of Victoria during six lockdowns across 2020 and 2021, which earned Melbourne the ignoble fame of longest period of lockdown in the world. For these 263 days of lockdown, her five and seven‐year‐old children needed to be home‐schooled, as government restrictions closed schools across the state. With paid childcare also suspended and familial care regarded as unsafe for older grandparents, all the daily care and teaching of her children had to be conducted within the home. Meanwhile, her teaching workload changed and moved online, her supervision duties increased as students’ mental health suffered, her archival research and in‐person interviews had to be postponed and her writing became unrealistic in the contexts of increased demands upon her caring capacity and workspaces within the home.

Determined to nevertheless chart some of the impacts of COVID‐19 upon academic mothers, Pascoe Leahy improvised a methodology born of necessity, one that could adapt to expanded and unpredictable demands upon caregivers’ time, both herself and her subjects. Unable to carve out sufficient time and privacy to follow her customary oral history methodology of expansive life history interviews with participants, she instead collected written anecdotes. Reaching out through personal contacts and social media, she invited academic mothers to send their reflections on pandemic impacts via email. ³⁴ Through this method of flexibility and serendipity, Pascoe Leahy pieced together musings from academic mothers that could be jotted down late at night or scrambled together between supervising school lessons or attending to email. Through such means, Pascoe Leahy was able to construct a maternal epistemology, analysing these fragments at odd spaces in her days.

This methodology born of convenience and disruption has been the only way that academic mothers can analyse academic mothers in these pandemic times. While there is an irony to our lack of time, in the sense that we authors are inhibited from studying academic mothers because we suffer from the self‐same conditions as our subjects, there is also a virtue in it. In the same way that Canadian feminist Andrea O'Reilly argues that mothers need a matricentric feminism that speaks to and from their maternal position, so too does genuine comprehension of the contradictions, complexities and compressions of academic motherhood require the additional insight of someone who has inhabited that position. ³⁵ Moreover, we argue that from this position of restriction and pressure an intellectual fertility emerges: a creativity born of necessity. If maternal subjectivity is an interrupted and encumbered subjectivity, as psychosocial researcher Lisa Baraitser argues, then what surprising possibilities can emerge from disruption? ³⁶ We concur with Knott that a new approach to academic research and writing is possible at this intersection between fecundity and constriction: ‘There was a set of working conditions that appeared in the text: being deprived of sleep, thankful for parental leave from my university, reading with an infant strapped to my front, continually interrupted. These interruptions disrupted the writing and gave the text its tempo’. ³⁷ The maternal epistemology we have pursued here is bred of short bursts of cognitive attention interspersed with wiping bottoms and noses, of deep thinking while following bicycle wheels to the park, of the co‐recognition and solidarity that can emerge between academic mothers who truly know what it is like to simultaneously hold open two demanding and all‐consuming subject positions. In this sense, there is a strange recognition between mothering and academia, as O'Reilly asserts:

On the one hand, the unbounded nature of academe demands and requires unencumberedness from family‐life and childrearing responsibilities and disembodiment at its core for professional and career success. And, on the other hand, ironically, mothering stipulates that ‘good’ mothers must be without boundaries when it comes to their maternal thinking and practice, which demands and requires at its core that good mothers are unencumbered by professional work, or at least that mothers act as if they are. ³⁸

If both mothering and academia are unbounded forms of work, where does that leave the woman who must be both, simultaneously? We argue that COVID‐19 has exacerbated the already‐near‐irreconcilable demands upon the academic mother, but that in this moment of crisis, there is the possibility for radical transformation.

The historical context of Australian motherhood within and outside academia

Australian academic mothers come to this doubly demanding role within a cultural context that is both connected to and distinct from academic mothers in other countries. As a settler colony founded on violent British dispossession of First Nations peoples, public understandings of maternity have been racialised since colonisation, built upon the White Australia Policy (which privileged British migrants) and the Stolen Generations (a set of policies removing Aboriginal children from their families with assimilatory intentions). ³⁹ Until the mid‐twentieth century, many middle‐class women eschewed paid work after having children, while their working‐class and migrant peers customarily engaged in paid work across the life cycle. ⁴⁰

After the Second World War, married women's labour force participation rose from 15 per cent in 1954 to 46 per cent in 1980, then to 60 per cent in 1993. ⁴¹ The transnational women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a key driver of this shift. The movement's insistence upon equal pay, childcare, equal access to education and the availability of birth control and abortion led to an emphasis upon the non‐maternal possibilities of women's subjectivity. ⁴² Many feminist demands found realisation in government policies in the 1970s and 1980s, including anti‐discrimination legislation and government‐supported childcare. ⁴³ Nevertheless, in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries, Australian women still suffered workforce discrimination because of their actual or assumed maternal role. ⁴⁴ A fundamental cultural tension remained unresolved. Many women continued to report an irreconcilability between their paid work and their care work. But by the twenty‐first century, this was experienced as a profound shock by new mothers. Raised in the aftermath of second‐wave feminism, these women had grown up assuming they would combine paid employment with mothering: that their identity would centre upon both. But they felt less prepared for the strength of their attachment to their children, the ‘maternal desire’ that left them feeling torn between their career and their maternality. ⁴⁵

This conflict plays out in the context of the academy, which bears a culture that is predicated upon an implicit norm of the autonomous male worker rather than assumptions of caregiving. Historically, most academic staff in Australian universities were employed on permanent or ongoing contracts (tenure) which offered job security, and a chance to conduct research and engage in teaching – with an academic's research typically informing the teaching component of their work. ⁴⁶ However, a noticeable shift began to occur in the 1990s, when Australian universities began to replace the value of higher education as a public investment in a wider social good with the neoliberal values of individualisation and graduate marketability, trends that have been embraced by academia globally. ⁴⁷ Recent research attests that higher education globally has become increasingly marketised, with universities focusing on factors such as administration and cost cutting, teaching evaluations, dependence on merit pay and concerns about university rankings in order to stay competitive. ⁴⁸ Although teaching is still regarded as an important component of academic work, research outputs and publication rates are increasingly used by universities to judge an academic's proficiency and employability, and by governments to rank and allocate funding. ⁴⁹ Australian academics face intensified pressure to demonstrate their efficiency in order to secure permanent employment or promotion. ⁵⁰

Within this context, there has been a mainstreaming of gender equality initiatives, many of which are specific to mothers. ⁵¹ Paid parental leave, on‐campus childcare facilities, flexible working arrangements and the transitional ‘phased‐return‐to‐work’ programme, which allows academic mothers to return to work in gradual stages, are all designed to keep careers on track while parents make time for new children or other family obligations. ⁵² Despite this, there is little doubt that gender asymmetries and inequalities persist. While there is relative gender equality among the overall academic workforce (53 per cent male, 47 per cent female), there is a gross gender disparity in appointments to senior positions, with 86 per cent more men than women at professorial levels and two thirds of Australian public university chancellor and vice chancellor positions occupied by men. ⁵³ Women also dominate the academic precariat as ‘non‐citizens’ – excluded from policy and decision‐making power with the increasingly precarious employment of casual, sessional and fixed‐term contracts decreasing the opportunity of a tenured academic career. At the same time, homosocial and hidden decision‐making processes, exclusion from male social networks, unsupportive human resource policies and gender asymmetric micro‐communications of power remain insidiously embedded in the culture of the Australian academy. ⁵⁴ Indeed, one of the most pervasive forms of gender inequality that particularly impacts mothers in academia is the reification of the discourse of the ideal worker as the quintessential academic. ⁵⁵ The ability to adhere to this construct is unsurprisingly difficult for women academics who are mothers – though we note that it is not necessarily easy for any academics, given that many of us desire meaningful connections to people and place. ⁵⁶

The invisibility of mothers in the academy before the COVID‐19 pandemic

In her pre‐COVID‐19 research, Gilbert and her colleagues explored academic mothers’ strategies to negotiate work‐family balance. ⁵⁷ Gilbert et al.’s research showed being valued in the academy means being ‘a machine’ according to the academic women in the research – with this machine centred around male life patterns and a lack of caring responsibilities. ⁵⁸ The academic mothers in Gilbert et al.’s research do, in fact, have significant childcare responsibilities, and are deeply invested in their intensive mothering commitments outside academia. However, they work hard to adhere to the ideal worker construct – largely by working outside business hours, because as one said, ‘you're still expected to be a man’. At the same time, Gilbert et al.’s research found that the collective discourse was that mothering is simply not valued in the academy: being a mother ‘puts you in the slow lane’. Indeed, a key finding was that the agency of the academic mothers as autonomous subjects is erased by others in the academy upon becoming a mother, with women redefined simply as objects. Accompanying the erasure of autonomy was a trivialisation of the maternal subject through a prevailing discourse of scepticism around maternity leave – positioned as a ‘break’, ‘holiday’ or as mothers ‘stealing something’, as well as a generalised scepticism about mothers’ productivity, communicated through comments such as ‘you'll have time to write because your baby will sleep loads’ (Jess).

Gilbert et al.’s research also examined the material effects of these culturally inscribed asymmetries on academic mothers’ everyday experiences and career opportunities. Academic mothers were ‘micromanaged’, passed over for opportunities, positioned as inconsiderate or expecting special treatment and often relegated to the institutional sidelines. Mothering was met with hostility and prejudice, and practices of exclusion were normalised in the academic landscape. Such experiences often had profound effects on mothers’ sense of self and mental health, and led many women to ‘hide’ their maternal status. Hiding mothering was seen as one of the more controllable practices that women could employ to avoid ‘subtle looks’ and the need to ‘perpetually justify where you're going and what you're doing’.

A critical disruption? The effects of COVID‐19 on academic mothers

If the COVID‐19 pandemic has enlarged maternal workloads in general, it has also amplified the already significant workloads of academic mothers across the globe and has amplified existing asymmetries within academia. ⁵⁹ For those with caring roles, most often women, research and writing has become impossible amid these competing claims for time and space. ⁶⁰ As Knott reflects, ‘For many caregivers, writing has simply halted, physically stopped in its tracks by the distraction and drag of immediate demands. By rights, this essay should stop here, trail off. Or it should name the many unwritten essays and half‐written articles among all our circles’. ⁶¹ By contrast, those with fewer caring responsibilities, more often men, are in some cases finding extra writing time during pandemic circumstances. Journal editors note that women are submitting fewer journal articles since the COVID‐19 pandemic began, up to 50 per cent less in some fields. ⁶² Academic publishers report that women are submitting fewer book proposals, requesting more deadline extensions and turning down peer review of proposals in greater numbers. Meanwhile Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press, noted ‘There are more good proposals coming in from men who are actually specifically referencing that they have more time’. ⁶³

One response to this ‘crisis of care’ has been the emergence of care manifestoes across US universities, including Indiana University, Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame, University of Oregon and University of California Los Angeles. The Indiana University Bloomington Care Caucus (IUBCC) asserts that this care crisis exacerbates pre‐existing inequalities within universities, particularly those relating to gender, labour and race. The IUBCC argue that although university administrators have provided opportunities for caregivers to voice their challenges, ‘words did not translate into substantive action’. ⁶⁴ In their 2020 analysis of how Australian, UK and US universities responded to COVID‐19, sociologists Meredith Nash and Brendan Churchill report that 80 per cent of US universities had publicly available information about institutional responses. While Australian universities tended to position the pandemic as requiring individualised responses such as negotiating flexible work arrangements or using personal or annual leave, some American universities offered more collective solutions. These include the availability of COVID‐19 leave (not predicated on exhausting personal leave), provision of emergency care arrangements (described as ‘backup care’ or ‘crisis care’) and – for 20 per cent of institutions – the provision of other support services such as meal deliveries or help with home‐schooling. ⁶⁵

While organised care manifestoes have not appeared in the Australian context, similar issues have challenged academic mothers in Australia. The results of the research Gilbert et al. conducted on managing mother work and academic work during the pandemic revealed that COVID‐19 provoked an unbinding of temporal and spatial boundaries. Unlike other professions in which flexible working arrangements are less common and the demand for ‘face time’ continues to thrive, universities have recognised flexible working arrangements as a feature of employment. ⁶⁶ However, such flexibility often means an extension of the working week and can result in less time with family. ⁶⁷ Gilbert et al.’s research showed that the transition to working from home, together with the loss of informal and formal childcare support, meant that the tensions between academic work and mother work became much more physically manifest. To borrow from Giddens, there was a ‘de‐routinisation’ of our carefully crafted, but often taken‐for‐granted, functionality and ‘ontological security’ that supports the management of our academic and mother work. ⁶⁸ During the early stages of the pandemic, the authors – along with many of the academic mothers in our research – experienced an intensely internalised pressure to continue to perform academically, despite the uncertainty that shaped our public and private lives. As part of this, there was a recognition that ‘the situation is not the same for everybody’ in the academy: it is especially difficult for women who are mothers. It is especially difficult because, as one of our research participants said, academic mothers often feel the need to ‘prove you're still firing on all cylinders – you can still be as productive as your counterparts who don't have families’ (Mary). Some mothers described the ‘invisible pressure’ of feeling the need to continue to ‘kick academic goals’, while others, such as Sally, gave vivid descriptions of this, saying, ‘I guess, I feel the need to prove myself like I promise I'll be able to keep up, this ball and chain attached to my ankle is dragging me back, but I promise, promise, promise I'll be able to keep up’.

Gilbert et al.’s research during COVID‐19 also found that the collective voice across academic mothers was that women ‘do all the care’, with the pandemic leaving ‘very little time for writing papers’. As one mother explained, ‘I'm the primary breadwinner. I'm the primary caregiver, and my husband does shift work, so he sleeps during the day and I do everything else’ (Thandi). Many of the other mothers talked about not being able to ‘get anything done during that period’, and how their experience of the pandemic stood in stark contrast to their male partners’ experiences, many of whom ‘went off to work each day for even longer’ (Thandi), with some ‘out of the house 14 hours every day since the pandemic started’ (Pamela); a situation that understandably left these women not only feeling ‘pissed off’ but ‘exceedingly stressed and exhausted’ (Kimberly). These mothers were also concerned about the longer‐term impact of this career disruption, especially the significant equity issue of the impact of COVID‐19 on mothers’ research productivity.

Pascoe Leahy found similar experiences in her research. In broad terms, the paid and unpaid workloads of academic mothers have increased during the pandemic, but the ways this has occurred has depended upon multiple factors. One significant factor is the age of the children in the family. Some mothers have found their teenage children are relatively self‐sufficient with schooling, whereas mothers with younger children have found care and home‐schooling demands more acute. Nevertheless, some mothers reported that adolescent children have required more emotional care during the pandemic (and rising rates of mental illness support this assertion), while younger children required more physical care and direct supervision but were less emotionally impacted. Another major influence upon pandemic experiences of academic mothers has been the availability of another adult carer. Sue, a single mother, described how the requirement to home‐school her son meant she moved paid work into the evenings, reducing her own sleep and leisure. Kayla explained that when her partner's paid employment ceased due to COVID‐19, she became the breadwinner: ‘my partner is primary carer while I work 6 days a week and do the bare minimum of mothering of my very patient daughters’. More commonly, academic mothers in relationships explained they had assumed more of the care load because their partners’ hours were fixed, or their partner earned more. Karen described how, ‘With our son at home, I stepped into a full‐time parenting role. As my husband is the primary earner, it only made sense that we divided responsibilities this way’. Even within heterosexual relationships where careful attention has previously been paid to sharing childrearing, maternal roles often increased under pandemic exigencies. Sofia explained that this is partly because there are new care roles to perform: ‘Managing each “transition” period – of the kids going to school/coming back/returning/coming back – the transitions to remote learning, back to campus, back to remote learning – has all fallen to me’.

Employment security has also inflected maternal experiences. While Sofia's sabbatical plans to write a book had been radically disrupted, an unexpected benefit was that ‘I've been able to read more than usual because it is possible to read while supervising some kinds of school activity… I think this will pay off longer‐term for myself; but not everyone around me has a longer‐term’. Academic mothers lacking continuing employment are particularly anxious about longer‐term career impacts. The rising numbers of precariously employed academics had already had deleterious effects on the mental health, relationships, career planning and financial status of casual academics. ⁶⁹ COVID‐19 has only worsened employment prospects for casual staff, as well as early and mid‐career researchers. A May 2020 survey found that COVID‐19 had negatively impacted the mental health, productivity and perceived career opportunities of early and mid‐career scientists, particularly female caregivers and those precariously employed. ⁷⁰

Academic mothers who had carefully planned having children, finishing PhDs and establishing a track record fear that their hoped‐for careers may not recover from coronavirus disruption. For Karen, a recent PhD graduate, ‘I was already entering the job market at a disadvantage to those who had spare time to dedicate to extra teaching and publication … This year was essential for me’. Kayla explained that because academic success is predicated upon unpaid work, the pandemic made it impossible for caregivers to continue performing this voluntary labour. Although she is ‘fortunate’ to have a primary‐carer partner, ‘excessive workloads and breadwinning responsibilities’ limits her time with her children, ‘which is a source of an ongoing, hard‐to‐articulate mix of sadness, resentment, frustration and anger’. ⁷¹

The impacts of coronavirus upon academic mothers are therefore short and long term. In the immediate sense, plans to finish articles and books will be postponed. Longer‐term, impacts will infuse publication track records, leading to diminished success on fellowships and grants and disruption of the planning essential to career success. Sally worries ‘how long everyone's memories will be, come 2023 when I am writing a ROPE [research opportunity relative to performance] statement and explaining all the gaps in output’. COVID‐19 may signal the end of academic careers for many mothers and will likely have far‐reaching effects on gender equality within higher education.

The (re)performance of mothering during the COVID‐19 pandemic

The pandemic represents precisely the kind of ‘critical situation’ that Giddens refers to, where ‘the radical disruption of routine produces a sort of corrosive effect upon the customary behaviour of the actor’ in the short term. ⁷² Others, such as Bury and Williams have captured Giddens’ idea through the notion of ‘biographical disruption’: the onset of an event that shifts an individual's taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the body and subjectivity, prompting a re‐evaluation of the meaning of life and one's place in the world. ⁷³ Many of the experiences recounted by academic mothers are of overwhelming disruption. However, this disruption, triggered by pandemic circumstances, is not solely obstructive to academic mothers. COVID‐19, particularly its protraction, has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers constantly manage into the spotlight: the criticality of the situation has visibilised the ‘routine and mundane’ provoking an opportunity to positively reinvent and re‐embody the self. ⁷⁴ To take a more post‐modern feminist stance, the performance of our subjectivities and practices has been literally realised as fluid, ongoing and temporal. ⁷⁵ Academic mothers have been compelled to admit that we come to our profession burdened – and enriched – by our dual roles as intellectuals and caregivers. The removal of care alternatives has forced universities to recognise the significant role that caregiving plays in the lives of many staff members and, crucially, to accommodate it. Whether this recognition and accommodation persists is as yet unknown, but while pandemic life persists we inhabit a space of both extreme difficulty and radical potentiality. Giddens’ treatment of historicity is also instructive here, the idea of the ‘consciousness of progressive movement’ to promote change. ⁷⁶ For us, this is a change in the way mothers are seen, and the way we see and perform ourselves in the academy. This particular progressive movement represents a chance to bring discussions about care and mothering in the academy into the open. As Kat reflected,

What I found refreshing about the pandemic has been the open acknowledgement of familial responsibilities … These have been focused around needing to be at home due to lockdown, online schooling but I suspect for many people – definitely for me – they were just a specific and intensified ‐ and ‘legitimate’ ‐ manifestation of much longer term parenting requirements. (…) I hope also these conversations can challenge the expectation that as academics we can't acknowledge our other responsibilities, joys, needs – as mothers, as community members, friends.

In her follow up research on the impacts of COVID‐19, Gilbert also found a distinct difference in the tenor of the mothers’ pre‐COVID‐19 experiences of managing academic and mother work, and their experiences of managing during the first wave of COVID‐19. Children, and the work they represent, were collectively recognised as no longer invisible and silenced within the university. The mothers did not, and could not, ‘hide’ their mothering anymore. As Kathleen explained, ‘I think we've had a really interesting experience with COVID, I've just had so many COVID wins’. Others described an increase in couple communication and task negotiation, involving being ‘really explicit with communicating what our needs are and not making assumptions about what the days will look like’ (Courtney) and the normalisation of paternal involvement in childcare. As Thandi explained, COVID‐19 has meant that ‘my husband gets a clear sense that I am working. I don't just sit around and read books (…) I think he's gotten more of that realization, it is a struggle’.

At the same time, virtual meetings via video conferencing has meant that our private lives and private spaces, and our children's lives and spaces have become visible to our colleagues. Through this visibility academic mothers have, for the first time, been ‘seen’ as embodied subjects. If we are to take seriously the problems surrounding the invisibility and erasure of mothering that are defining features of the academy, this new visibility is crucial to a reimagining of the academic landscape. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the pandemic have elicited, or compelled, a desire and courage to perform a different kind of maternal subjectivity at work: ‘I don't give as much of a shit, and it's probably because of COVID’ was a sentiment described by Sally, but shared by many of the research participants. As Thandi explained, ‘I used to spend a lot of time trying to be liked (…) [Since COVID‐19] I was just like… I don't give a fuck what you think about me’.

COVID‐19 has presented us with a critical moment of transformation, an opportunity to leverage disruption and positively re‐perform our maternal selves in the academy. We are now less inclined to ‘give a fuck’ about adhering to the gendered discursive construction of the ideal worker and are more willing to let our mothering visibly spill into work practices. As one mother aptly said, ‘a good thing that's come out of this experience is that people are much more aware of the other responsibilities everyone's got, the fact we are all juggling all these things and it was known but now it's seen – that feels good’ (Charlotte). Some mothers described how the act of ‘letting home or domestic life into the world of academia’ was ‘comforting’ and ‘reassuring’. As Kendra said, ‘COVID‐19 has been really interesting because it has given us an opportunity to make our children more visible (…) instead of making excuses and keeping the kids hidden away’.

At the same time, COVID‐19 has had multivalent impacts upon academic mothers. Throughout the pandemic, academic mothers may have been pushed out of university settings, and the blurring of boundaries between work and family means that home becomes the primary workplace for both domestic and academic work. This can lead to all of women's work being ‘hidden in the household’, where academic and care work may be further devalued precisely because it is the unseen, work performed by women in the private sphere. ⁷⁷ For some, gendered care lines, workplace practices and cultures may not be eroded, but instead become more firmly entrenched. For others, race and cultural identity further complicate maternal experience, with some women of colour reporting that working from home forced a window into their private life that serves to perpetuate the ‘othering’ of Black women, ‘because “professionalism” is coded by white middle‐/upper‐social‐class standards and Black workers are disproportionately affected by judgments of professionalism and cultural fit’. ⁷⁸

Yet, central to our argument and evoked throughout all the accounts related here is that we are not simply passive victims of the pandemic. As academic mothers, we are individually and collectively agentic in (re)performing a new maternal subjectivity in the academy. For us, this is a liberating (re)performance, and it is entirely necessary if we are to invoke changes in the treatment of mothering embedded in the cultural landscape of the academy.

By way of concluding, academic mothers have made it clear that there is a disconnect between gender equity policies in academia and mothers’ ability to adopt these policies in practice. This has resulted in a kind of ideological hamstringing. Mothers often see gender equity policies as paying lip service to women – where they seem to represent a challenge to the gendered status quo – but the neo‐liberalist culture in which they are inscribed renders them impossible to effectively take up. It is expected that work gets done, and the context in which it is done is ultimately of little relevance. This is a very real systemic issue that requires a transformation at the level of academic culture. Policy options can only be effective if there is permission within the workforce culture to take them up.

Though we have focused on mothering younger children, mothering continues across the life course, including mothering adult children and grandchildren, and is often an entry into the many types of caregiving that adults perform for older relatives, spouses and others. Thus, the ways in which caregiving has been made more difficult for mothers during the pandemic, and the factors which might better enable mothering, are relevant for academics more broadly, who must all perform different kinds of caregiving and care‐receiving across their lives. We focus here on the gendered dimensions of parenting in recognition that the double inequity that mothers experience remains unresolved. However, we believe that there are important solidarities to be forged with other caregivers, recognising our mutual imbrication in care.

Having now begun to visibilise academic mothering, we argue several further interventions are critical to a matricentric feminist reimagining of how care might co‐exist with academia. First, we need to be clear and consistent about how the impacts of caregiving are measured and accommodated within higher education. Universities and funding bodies increasingly invite academics to explain how life circumstances – including caregiving, disability or discrimination – have affected their performance or track record. Some academics now include career interruptions such as parental leave or miscarriage in their curriculum vitae. ⁷⁹ Some universities are evaluating the inclusion of ‘caregiver statements’ in contract renewal and tenure applications. ⁸⁰ We see benefit in such overt acknowledgement of the ways in which care, and other factors, influence academic careers. Yet without explicit guidance on how to factor such information into decision‐making, disclosure of limitations on one's availability risks further marginalisation. We argue that the impacts of caregiving need to be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively where possible. For example, the Australian Research Council invites applicants to calculate duration, time fraction and type of career interruptions in funding proposals, in addition to describing how interruptions have impeded capacity. But academic mothers report that colleagues advise against highlighting caregiving disruptions for fear of unsympathetic assessors. ⁸¹ This demonstrates the critical importance of clear guidelines and training for how to meaningfully evaluate such factors in decision‐making for funding, employment, promotion and performance review. Visibility without a substantive and consistent response can result in vulnerability.

Second, we call for the forging of new solidarities of care, across academic hierarchies and types of caregiving. Universities genuinely committed to the support of caregiving staff could create programmes for champions and mentors, who explicitly model a greater care visibility in their working lives. This could include regular reminders of the leave available for care of elderly, disabled or young family members, allowing flexible working hours, not scheduling meetings outside business hours or during school holidays and – crucially – talking about both the impacts of care and the workplace allowances that are available openly and frequently. Such champions would ideally be diverse in terms of gender, academic roles and caregiving roles, to challenge the stereotype that only women of childbearing age carry care responsibilities.

Third, universities need to examine their workplace cultures and evaluate whether they are genuinely providing safe working environments – a legal requirement under Australian occupational health and safety regulations. Across the sector, the ideal academic worker is implicitly understood to be a male workaholic unattached to place connections or caregiving commitments. It is unsurprising that pursuit of this unattainable ideal leads to stress and burnout among many. Universities committed to safe and inclusive workplaces could explicitly acknowledge in human resource strategies that all academics have vulnerabilities and strengths, dependencies and responsibilities. They could mandate that all positions can be worked flexibly as to hours and/or location, and that all full‐time positions must be advertised as potentially part‐time or job‐share arrangements. Similarly, all short‐term fellowship or visiting positions could have flexible durations and the ability to be worked remotely. The alternative is perpetuating a system that tangibly disadvantages academics with caring responsibilities and/or mobility restrictions. Such changes would benefit us all. It would allow academics to attend to the connections to people and place that make life meaningful – rather than requiring severing of those connections as a prerequisite for success.

Finally, caregiving needs to be understood as more than a burden and an impediment. Mothers and other carers are not simply circumscribed by caregiving. In her rich elaboration of ‘maternal thinking’, philosopher Sara Ruddick proposes that through thoughtful engagement in caring for a vulnerable and ever‐changing child, a mother can adopt a distinctive ethical and reflexive position. ⁸² Building on this, we suggest that a person's workforce capabilities may be enhanced as much as constricted by maternality and other caregiving. One of the potential impacts of COVID‐19 could be to create a space where we can reimagine caregiving as not just a lack but also a potentiality. Some academic mothers have attempted this in promotion or funding applications, listing their caring duties as expanding their academic expertise – though this is easier for scholars whose expertise touches on issues of caring or parenting. Another way to approach this is by revaluing care in the way we practice our academic work. This includes care in our kindness to colleagues, ‘pedagogical kindness’ in our teaching and implementing a relational care in our approaches to sustainable and ethical research. ⁸³ The maternal epistemology proposed in this article is one example of reframing the disruptive potential of care within academia.

We recognise such assertions are challenging. But the potential beneficiaries reach beyond those currently working as academic mothers. The culture of academic work dissuades not only current but also potential parents. In addition to the difficulties recounted by academic mothers in this article, it is worth reflecting upon the extent to which academia also damages prospects for maternal futures. A 2018 survey found that 38 per cent of PhD students and 37 per cent of postdoctoral researchers were not intending to have children due to a fear that becoming a parent negatively impacts academic careers. Of those who were parents, 58 per cent of doctoral students and 46 per cent of postdoctoral researchers said their children significantly impacted their career. ⁸⁴ If substantial proportions of junior researchers view parenthood as incompatible with academic success, it is also possible that such fears cause unintended infertility. Academic Muireann Irish mused, ‘A lot of people have delayed starting families to the point where they experience difficulty in actually conceiving because they're so concerned with staying competitive and staying afloat’. ⁸⁵

The worst excesses of academic culture ultimately harm the entire profession, not only mothers. The expectations that impede mothers are based upon a fictional persona of a man with no caring responsibilities, no attachment to place, no obligations beyond those of his job – one who accepts hypermobility and overwork without demur. Questioning the appropriateness of these expectations for mothers exposes the fallacy of this ideal for all academics. This is part of the complex entanglement of the problem COVID‐19 has exposed: it will not be solved simply by offering childcare subsidies or additional parental leave, but rather is fundamentally implicated in the structures and culture which comprise twenty‐first‐century academia.

If pre‐COVID‐19 academic expectations were demanding, pandemic circumstances have only exacerbated such cultural conditions in the short term, particularly for those intertwined in relationships of care. Short‐term maternal impacts have included heightened unpaid care loads and paid workloads, with many mothers reporting burnout, stress and fatigue. In the longer term, it is probable that COVID‐19 will impact an entire generation of academic mothers: they will leave the profession entirely or suffer continuing disadvantages for the remainder of their careers. In this sense, it is quite possible that COVID‐19 will further impact maternal futures within academia, with women knowingly or inadvertently sacrificing motherhood in the hopes of academic career success. To meaningfully attend to the profound inequities of pandemic impacts upon academics, universities need to ensure that their efforts to support mothers and other caregivers are implemented over long‐term periods, because the ripple effects of COVID‐19 will be felt across entire careers.

But, in the gender and care fault lines exposed by the pandemic, the potential for positive change has also emerged. In exposing our private lives to the gaze of colleagues, the pandemic has made it impossible to continue invisibilising and silencing mothering within the academy. Universities have been forced to make allowances for care loads, in the absence of viable alternatives. Once seen and accommodated, we have an opportunity to reimagine academic mothering as more than a burden and a constraint. Within this rupture lies the potential for radical change.

We write this article in a spirit of stubborn optimism. We recognise that work must be done to implement reform, and we acknowledge that this workload will often fall upon these self‐same academic mothers. Nevertheless, we insist that we are living through a painful but expansive moment of radical potential. A first step all universities can make is to genuinely listen to the experiences of caregivers – to recognise that collaborative witnessing is a deeply political act with its own worth. Second, we invite readers to circulate this article among universities and professional bodies to spark a collective conversation about what each of us can do to preserve some space within academia where we recognise that care matters.

Biographies

Emilee Gilbert is a feminist sociologist and an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, Western Sydney University (Australia). Her research interests are gender equity, feminism and health. Gilbert is an elected member of the International Academy of Sex Research and leads an Equity and Diversity Research group at Western.

Carla Pascoe Leahy is a Lecturer in Family History at the University of Tasmania (Australia), Joint Editor of Studies in Oral History and Honorary Associate at the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria. Her research examines contemporary histories of women and children, with a focus on motherhood, childhood, place and environment.