DIAL THE PRIVILEGE LEVEL UP TO TWELVE.

Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus.  Let's see, there's a pandemic on, there are people who are attempting to stretch three months of savings into ... who knows how long, the way some governors and mayors are going on, and people hoping the kids don't go through the box of cereal before the food bank issues another ration.

Women — who inevitably shoulder a greater share of family responsibilities — seem to be submitting fewer papers. This threatens to derail the careers of women in academia, says Leslie Gonzales, a professor of education administration at Michigan State University, who focuses on strategies for diversifying the academic field: When institutions are deciding who to grant tenure to, how will they evaluate a candidate’s accomplishments during coronavirus?

“We don’t want a committee to look at the outlier productivity of, say, a white hetero man with a spouse at home and say, ‘Well, this person managed it,’” says Gonzales. “We don’t want to make that our benchmark.”

I don't know, maybe the "spouse at home" is the omitted variable in the study, or perhaps the "white hetero male" has managed to negotiate a division of labor within the family that works, or maybe it's the administrivia that's getting in the way of the scholarship, not keeping an eye on the kiddos.  That division of labor might work in research as well. "Submissions are stable for women working as part of a team."