3

Caregiving Challenges and Implications for Equity in STEMM

This chapter draws substantially from the research paper “A Comprehensive Literature Review of Caregiving Challenges to STEMM Faculty and Institutional Approaches Supporting Caregivers,” by Joya Misra, Ph.D., Jennifer Lundquist, Ph.D., and Joanna Riccitelli, which was commissioned for this study.¹

As greater attention to caregiving is needed across the labor force given the experiences and trends detailed in the last chapter, the conflicts between family caregiving and paid labor are particularly acute for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. This chapter details the ways in which assumptions about gender and race/ethnicity intersect with cultural norms and rewards systems at work to produce challenges for family caregivers in academic STEMM. It describes how family caregiving responsibilities clash with ingrained norms in academic STEMM fields that implicitly assume that all STEMM workers and students can exhibit unwavering devotion to STEMM and remain constantly available and visible when learning and working in these fields. These norms are also buffered by systems that reward those who work long hours through grants, promotions, tenure, and raises. Such norms hurt creativity and innovation in STEMM, drive bias and discrimination against caregivers who may be seen as unable to meet these norms regardless of actual productivity, and ultimately affect the structure of learning, working, and advancement in STEMM in ways that fundamentally undermine the retention and advancement of family caregivers in academic STEMM. People of all genders who have caregiving responsibilities are negatively affected by these norms, but they have a disproportionate effect on women who are most often in caregiving roles. Unpacking the ramifications of “ideal worker” norms and

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¹ The full paper is available at https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27416.

flexibility stigma within academic STEMM is crucial to understanding the cultural context that both shapes current policies and practices and directs attention to where action is needed to promote change.

IDEAL WORKER NORM AND WORK DEVOTION SCHEMA² IN STEMM

In academic STEMM, strong and resilient norms about ideal workers shape our cultural conceptions of how people should approach working. These norms amplify tensions with any responsibilities in a person’s life outside of paid labor (Blair-Loy, 2001; Kossek, Perrigino, & Rock, 2021; Williams, 1989). As described by Kachchaf and colleagues (2015), the ideal worker in STEMM is characterized by “commitment to the job through long hours, unbroken career trajectories, and constant availability and visibility.” The ideal worker norm assumes that the individual worker has no significant care responsibilities and, instead, is cared for by other members of their household (Kachchaf et al., 2015). Ideal worker norms in STEMM reflect the implicit assumption that STEMM students and professionals are White, heterosexual, upper-class men without caregiving responsibilities (Acker, 2006; Bird, 2011; Carrigan et al., 2011; Gatta & Roos, 2004; Kachchaf et al., 2015; Sallee, 2012). As Gatta and Roos (2004, p. 124) argue, the assumption underlying the ideal worker norm is that all workers have a ‘‘full-time wife at home fulfilling the roles of childcare worker, eldercare provider, maid, launderer, and chef, among other duties.”

Ideal worker norms produce a set of productivity standards in STEMM that reinforce expectations of working around the clock with little recognition of outside needs or even the physical limitations of workers (Drago et al., 2006; Ecklund & Lincoln, 2016; Kachchaf et al., 2015; Sallee, 2012). Academic organizations have earned a reputation for being “greedy institutions” that expect STEMM academics to spend substantial and intensive hours working (Cech & Blair-Loy, 2019; Ecklund & Lincoln, 2016; Kachchaf et al., 2015; Kossek & Lee, 2022; Misra et al., 2012; Sallee, 2012; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012). Researchers note that many STEMM faculty are expected to work “60–80 hours per week, without time constraints or boundaries,” making balancing caregiving and career challenging (Ecklund

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² Cultural schemas are cognitive patterns individuals use to organize, understand, and interpret their social world. They help to create meaning and can shape how people act and interact.

et al., 2017). In the words of one participant in a qualitative study of how women faculty with small children manage their parental and professional roles at research universities (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012):

Importantly as well, long hours are frequently rewarded with higher pay, producing even greater pressure to work longer (Cha & Weeden, 2014; Goldin, 2023). All of this contributes to challenges for many individuals to set boundaries for themselves and freely choose their time spent on work, as rewards for meeting these expectations and censure for failure to do so are high.

There is a moral component to long hours within academic STEMM, as the culture frequently demands intense devotion to work based on the belief that an individual’s work is not simply a job, but instead a professional identity and vocation (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022). Workers who accept a work-devotion schema as true embody the following:

While these culturally reinforced norms and rules may seem most explicitly to apply to university employees, they also affect students, residents, fellows, and even hourly workers who are building toward academic and research careers. Cultural expectations for work devotion and professional sacrifice are particular challenges for these groups because they lack the status, power, and autonomy to set firm boundaries when faced with expectations to work long hours (Lambert et al., 2022).

The ideal worker norm and work devotion schema in STEMM originate from a time when these fields were less diverse than they are today. While many STEMM fields still struggle to be diverse and inclusive, due in

large part to the challenges outlined in this report, the demographic makeup of STEMM education and the workforce has undergone a major shift over the last several decades. Women are now in the majority of most medical school classes and are at parity in many fields in the life sciences (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020). The number of STEMM degrees earned by women of color has doubled over the past 10 years (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2021). Social norms about fatherhood are also changing in ways that conflict with ideal worker norm expectations in STEMM. Today, faculty men are experiencing both greater desire and greater pressure to contribute to family caregiving (Damaske et al., 2014; Marotte et al., 2011). Ideal worker and work devotion mandates are incompatible with today’s more diverse STEMM workforce, create substantial barriers to participation of family caregivers in STEMM, and thereby undermine the vitality of the STEMM workforce.

CONSEQUENCES OF IDEAL WORKER AND WORK DEVOTION NORMS TO STEMM INNOVATION AND VITALITY

Research suggests that ideal worker and work devotion norms may serve to stymie innovation in STEMM, drive potential burnout, and reinforce outdated assumptions about gender. Constant work can serve to diminish creativity and discovery. Recent psychological literature has shown that time for rest and to allow one’s mind to wander rather than remaining intently focused on one task or goal provides greater space for discovery and creativity (Newport, 2016; Pang, 2016). Current work devotion schemas, however, do not provide much space for the kind of rest and time away that can be so fruitful for innovation (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022).

Furthermore, overwork driven by these norms can lead to burnout, which results from unrelenting workplace stress (World Health Organization, 2019). In the most stressful overwork environments, STEMM workers may risk significant individual consequences on health as well as experience greater intentions to drop out, decreased job satisfaction, and less connection to their work (Mayo Clinic, 2023; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019; National Academy of Medicine, 2022). One examination of burnout among women faculty in computer science departments found that women were more likely than men to consider leaving during the pandemic because of increased work-family conflict and burnout, along with decreased job satisfaction (Lawson et al., 2023).

Ideal Worker Norms and Gender

Ideal worker norms are harmful to all groups, but they have different consequences for men than they do for women. For women, they fuel bias—assumptions that women are not ideal workers because they have responsibilities to care for others outside of work and therefore are not qualified for professorial positions or for promotions (Williams, 2000). For men, they fuel pressures to work the same kind of hours and patterns as someone who has no ongoing responsibilities for daily care of others (Williams, 2000) and limit their ability to be involved in caregiving (Reddick et al., 2012; Sallee, 2012; Sallee & Lester, 2009; Sallee et al., 2016). The gendered societal expectation that women will carry out a larger share of household labor and caregiving means that a man’s desire to be an involved caregiver is seen as out of the ordinary, and perhaps an invalid reason for placing boundaries around their time at work (Gheyoh Ndzi, 2023). And for women, these expectations result in more permeable work-nonwork boundaries and often more work-life conflict due to increased role overload from trying to carry out caregiving and work demands at the same time (Kossek & Lee, 2020, 2022). One consequence of ideal worker norms is that academic mothers and fathers are often reluctant to use supportive policies, such as stop-the-clock tenure policies, because doing so could be seen as violating the ideal worker norm that they always should be working and that familial obligations either do not exist or, if they do, do not infringe upon availability or productivity (Drago et al., 2006; Williams & Lee, 2016). Sallee (2012) and colleagues (Sallee et al., 2016) find that gendered norms for parenting led to male faculty perceiving or being explicitly told that they were unable to avail themselves of stop-the-clock policies and other accommodations intended to support faculty parents following the birth or adoption of a child. This highlights how policy changes to facilitate the balance of caregiving and work are insufficient if they do not address the cultural barriers that constrain who is seen as a valid candidate for such policies and who is not (Kossek et al., 2009).

Given all of this, ideal worker norms harm those, regardless of gender, who engage in family caregiving because this work challenges assumptions of complete devotion to work. This custom operates differently for men and women but has consequences for both. Additionally, ideal worker norms produce unique gender consequences for women that they do not for men. Along with facing challenges when they are in fact providing caregiving labor outside of paid work, women also face assumptions that

they will inevitably become mothers or caregivers and thus will at some point become less committed to their work (Thébaud and Taylor, 2021). Given this, women face potential bias as caregivers even when they are not. Both of these factors can be at play and influence how caregivers, women in general, and particularly women caregivers are treated and evaluated in the workplace.

BIAS AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST CAREGIVERS

Maternal Wall Bias and the Motherhood Penalty

Ideal worker norms in STEMM fields give rise to bias and discrimination against caregivers, particularly women. For example, a large body of research has documented a “motherhood penalty,” which is defined as negative effects on pay, hiring, and advancement for mothers whether through discrimination or other factors, as well as “maternal wall bias,” which is defined as discrimination against mothers simply for being mothers, across industries and occupations. Both of these barriers operate in part based on beliefs that mothers are less committed to the organization, and even less competent, than women without children and men with and without children (Benard et al., 2004; Correll et al., 2007; Cuddy et al., 2004). Workplace surveys show that maternal wall bias affects a large proportion of women, with over half of women in some samples reporting that colleagues question their commitment and competence after having children (Williams et al., 2018). Recent data has also found that women in STEMM are three times more likely than men to say they have experienced a decrease in the professional opportunities they are offered after becoming a parent (Torres et al., 2023a).

Maternal wall bias is particularly potent in academic STEMM because it is rooted in the moralized culture of these fields. As previously noted, widely held beliefs about merit in academic STEMM include beliefs that academic science is a vocation that demands and deserves single-minded “work devotion” (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022). For mothers, far more so than for fathers, childbirth and childrearing are believed to violate their scientific excellence and devotion (Morgan et al., 2021). Among equally productive STEM faculty, mothers are often viewed as less productive (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022). Research has shown that women often need to work harder to achieve the same recognition as men, and thus “successful women will need to be the most ideal of ideal workers” (Drago et al., 2006). In one

study of STEM and non-STEM faculty at a research-intensive university, Kmec (2013) finds that STEM mothers are more likely to say that they must work “very hard” on the job, reporting significantly higher levels of work intensity than STEM fathers as well as non-STEM mothers report, controlling for a variety of relevant factors. Kmec interprets this as mothers in STEM, who are countering a wide set of stereotypes that suggest women and mothers are incongruous in STEM fields, must work harder to avoid perceptions that they do not belong in their jobs (Kmec, 2013). Another study found that women scientists need 64 more impact points than men to be seen as equally competent, amounting to three more publications in Nature or Science and 20 more publications in less prestigious journals (DesRoches et al., 2010).

Even women who are not mothers may experience maternal wall bias. For instance, in an interview study, highly motivated Ph.D. students without children reported feeling constrained by the stigmatized cultural “specter” of motherhood (Thébaud & Taylor, 2021). Women and men interviewees in the study reported that women graduate students were more likely than their men counterparts to face warnings from faculty advisors that parenthood is incompatible with scientific excellence. For instance, one study participant shared that her faculty advisor, who is a father, told her “There’s more to life than babies . . . you should have a passion for science that should be driving you more than . . . family.” Another participant in the study shared that her advisor told her “I hope you don’t have a kid during grad school” because “[I don’t] know how any woman would graduate when they have a kid.” Such comments encouraged some women to hide or constrain their parenthood plans or to leave academic STEM (Thébaud & Taylor, 2021).

Though maternal wall bias affects even women whose work patterns do not change after they have children, many women’s work patterns do change. That is because academia defines the ideal worker as someone who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing. The result is work-family conflict, which is exacerbated in academia due to rigid “up-or-out” career tracks, and further exacerbated in STEMM due to the extremely long work hours, including for “night science,” that is, experiments that need to be tended even into night hours (Williams, 2000). Yet when mothers respond by attempting to cut back, often they are driven out of academia altogether or onto research tracks that lack the prestige, and often the benefits, available to tenure-track professors (including maternity leave) (Zheng et al., 2022). This corrodes the quality of women scientists’ jobs at just the same

time when they are struggling to perform as ideal workers without the support for family caregiving available to most men. In fact, the largest leak of women out of the STEM pipeline is when they start families (Goulden et al., 2011). Women Ph.D.s with young children are four times more likely than women without children to leave the labor market entirely (Wolfinger et al., 2009). More recent research found that nearly one-half of new mothers left full-time work in STEMM following the birth of a child, compared with one-quarter of new fathers (Cech & Blair-Loy, 2019).

Given these findings, it is unsurprising that maternal wall bias and motherhood penalties carry economic consequences. Research shows that women often experience sudden, large, and persistent drops in labor market earnings with the arrival of their first child. For example, using 1976–2017 Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, or PSID, data, Cortés and Pan (2020) estimate about 40 percent lower earnings for mothers relative to fathers 5 to 10 years after the arrival of the first child. The actual dollar amounts of these employment-related costs to women were calculated through a recent dynamic microsimulation study of women born between 1981 and 1985 who provide unpaid care to minor children and parents, parents-in-law, and spouses/unmarried partners with care needs (Johnson et al., 2023). These employment-related caregiving costs to women average $295,000 over a lifetime—80 percent of these lifetime employment-related costs are due to lost earnings ($237,000) and 20 percent are due to lost retirement income from Social Security and employment-based plans ($58,000) (Johnson et al., 2023). These employment-related costs are particularly high for mothers with multiple children and for “well-educated mothers, who generally earn higher wages than less-educated ones. Lifetime costs average $420,000 for college-educated mothers, $202,000 for mothers who completed high school but did not attend college, and $122,000 for mothers who did not complete high school” (Johnson et al., 2023). Such motherhood penalties have also been documented among highly educated professionals, such as STEMM professionals (Cech and Blair-Loy, 2019), M.B.A. graduates (Bertrand et al., 2010), and law school graduates (Azmat & Ferrer, 2017).

Women of color may be most affected by these barriers, given studies documenting that they encounter higher levels of bias triggered by both gender and race, compared with White women (Williams, 2014). Racialized conceptions of motherhood as well as distinct histories of caregiving along racial lines shape the ways in which maternal wall bias is experienced by women of different races (Williams et al., 2020). In a study interviewing 60 women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,

Williams (2014) examined experiences of the maternal wall among Black, Latina, and Asian women. While some similarities to White women emerged (e.g., similarly high rates of White women and women of color reported feeling their career commitment was questioned after giving birth to or adopting a child), important distinctions also arose in interviews. For Black women, for example, higher rates of single motherhood and stereotypes of this status were salient. One respondent pointed out that a man with three children “will be treated like a breadwinner,” but a single Black woman with three children will not be treated kindly (Williams, 2014, 203). Latina respondents were affected by close cultural associations of Latinas and motherhood and particular expectations both in the workplace and in their home lives that they would have many children that could reduce their time and commitment for paid labor. They also are more likely to face greater career risk and stigmatization for not being seen as career competent when using flexible and alternative work arrangements, which may further marginalize them from other colleagues for working differently than the norm (Kossek et al., 2023). For Asian women, findings were more complex, as stereotypes of strong familial orientation countered stereotypes of the model minority predicting strong commitment to work (Williams, 2014).

While women of color can face greater challenges associated with maternal wall bias in the workplace, the distinctions between White women and women of color do not always place women of color at a disadvantage. Cultural conceptions of family obligation as well as strong community ties provide a broader community of support for many mothers of color (Williams, 2014). Many immigrant Asian women respondents noted the benefit of their own parents’ willingness to come to the United States to help care for grandchildren, and Black women described a much broader circle of caregivers they could turn to for support, including extended family and church communities (Collins, 1991; Stack, 1974). This offers important resources that can provide significant aid to individuals but does not offset or reduce the significant barriers they encounter due to intersecting biases based on race/ethnicity and gender.

Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Other Caregiving Biases

Caregiving, of course, is not confined solely to care for children. Women also carry a major load in caregiving for adults—whether in the form of spousal care, care for adult dependents, or care for aging parents or other loved ones. Many women also find themselves providing what has been termed

“sandwich care,” or care for both young children and adult dependents/aging relatives or kin (Pierret, 2006; Suh, 2016). One study of hiring discrimination found that sandwich caregivers were evaluated most negatively by employers in all occupations, regardless of whether those occupations were dominated by men or women (Henle et al., 2020). One randomized control study found that sandwich caregivers who work in health care also caring for older adults are likely to report the highest levels of psychological distress and be in the most need of workplace interventions that are designed to provide more workplace social support for the family role (Kossek et al., 2019). While research has shown an increasing move toward greater sharing of childcare responsibilities by men, a similar move in the direction of gender parity has not been observed in older adult care, including care for a woman’s husband’s parents (Grigoryeva, 2017). Women are also more likely than men to be the sole caregiver or provide most of the care for an adult family member and to provide a greater intensity of care than men (AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, 2020). And while the intensity of care men provide is most influenced by the presence of other caregivers, the intensity of care women provide is more often influenced by constraints on their time from paid labor or other caregiving demands (Grigoryeva, 2017).

Norms of care for aging parents and other family members also tend to be weaker among White Americans compared with Americans and immigrants of color, and research has found that caregivers of color report stronger beliefs in filial obligation than do White caregivers (Pinquart & Sörensen, 2005). There is also some evidence that intensity of adult care varies by race/ethnicity. Though estimates vary, a few studies have reported that Black and Hispanic women on average perform higher levels of intensity of adult care compared with White caregivers (Cohen et al., 2019). Black caregivers are also much more likely to provide informal care beyond immediate family members to others such as friends or church members (Cohen et al., 2019; McCann et al., 2000). Together, this can produce differences in the degree to which caregivers are engaged in care of adults by race/ethnicity.

This reality was evidenced in the interviews conducted as part of this study. Broader systems of advantage and disadvantage by race/ethnicity, gender, and class heavily shaped caregivers’ ability to manage conflicting career-caregiving demands. Caregivers of color suggested that these systems of privilege simultaneously influenced the structural and interpersonal likelihood that a STEMM scholar would be faced with intensive caregiving conflict as well as the extent of guidance or institutional support they might receive in facing such conflict. One respondent discussed how privilege

worked to allow greater space to manage competing demands for some, while leaving others with much less support:

Caregivers of color relayed how, in the context of longstanding structural racism and exclusion in their institutions and disciplines, it seemed that they were expected to fail when negotiating conflicting career-caregiving demands. This was seen in how departments and institutions responded to challenges caregivers of color faced as well as assumptions made about how they were doing:

Caregivers of color also repeatedly highlighted the central importance of robust institutional support for caregivers as a core equity issue. For institutions aiming to build belonging, equity, and inclusion, they argued recognizing the cultural value of caregiving and supporting scholars in providing that care was critical. As one respondent noted:

Flexibility Stigma

Those in academic STEMM who have taken advantage of family supportive policies sometimes face penalties in the form of a lack of support from department chairs and colleagues, as well as retaliation in career assessments (Kachchaf et al., 2015; Kossek & Lee, 2022; Sallee, 2012; Williams, 2005, 2014). Cech and Blair-Loy (2014) describe such penalties for those who take care-related workplace accommodations as “flexibility stigma” (see also Blair-Loy and Cech, 2022; Williams et al., 2016). They find in their research that individuals in academic STEMM who use informal or formal arrangements to balance care for their children are seen by colleagues as less committed to their careers. Williams et al. (2016) argue that resistance to flexible work policies is “fueled by identity threat”; that is, work is often so intimately tied to identity that efforts to reform the hegemonic culture of (over)work can be threatening to those who developed their identities around the original model (of the ideal worker).

As mentioned throughout this chapter, though this stigma has ramifications regardless of gender, women face unique and disproportionate burdens. Research has shown that women with children are often the “default parent” even in two-parent households where both parents are employed outside the home (Calarco et al., 2021; Hosek & Harrigan, 2023; Rinaldo & Whalen, 2023). This default status increases mothers’ need for flexibility as they are seen as the go-to parent for unexpected events such as illness, school closures, or other disruptions. Given that mothers are more likely to need this kind of last-minute flexibility, this opens them up more frequently to the potential for flexibility stigma.

Despite the existence and usage of leave and caregiving policies, STEMM men and women caregivers who experience this stigma are less likely to be satisfied at the institution, less likely to feel work-life balance, less likely to plan to stay at the institution, and more likely to consider leaving academia for industry (Cech & Blair-Loy, 2014). At the most extreme, some in academic STEMM may face family responsibilities discrimination

based on their family caregiver status (WorkLife Law, 2017). For example, Williams and Norton (2010) describe one lawsuit after a woman faculty member took parental leave and delayed her tenure clock:

Institutions that do not address this stigma are more likely to lose valuable STEMM professionals, and those who do may be advantaged in attracting them.

THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL SCHEMAS ON THE ORGANIZATION OF STEMM

Cultural schemas shape the organization of STEMM work and learning environments in ways that reflect assumptions about who is carrying out the work and how their lives are organized. Since ideal worker norms and expectations of devotion in academic STEMM implicitly assume a lack of outside obligations, such as that for caregiving, expectations for career trajectories and everyday work and educational arrangements often follow this assumption. So far, this report has largely focused on the influence of cultural norms, but the solutions are in acknowledging they exist and taking action to limit their consequences.

Cultural effects show up as formal and informal policies in career tracks, grant eligibility and timelines, and work emphasis. Today’s academic careers are organized in a neat, linear fashion—undergraduate education, graduate school, postdoctoral work, and entering the tenure track with a linear ascension from assistant to associate to full professor—that does not recognize how care responsibilities may impede progress (Winslow & Davis, 2016). Indeed, the time-delineated tenure clock often hits academics precisely at the life stage when many would ideally have children (often having delayed this during training) (Beckerle et al., 2011; Jacobs & Winslow, 2004; Mason et al., 2019; Winslow & Davis, 2016). Academic promotion and recognition often have milestones that are difficult to meet as a part-time academic,

and tenure clocks generally do not tolerate periods of lower career intensity. Addressing these structural barriers to family caregivers in STEMM requires that higher education institutions, federal agencies, and accrediting bodies acknowledge they exist and initiate appropriate countermeasures.

The timing of grants often fits assumptions about outside obligations as well and proves challenging for caregivers. Many early-career grants place time-delimited requirements on when a person is eligible to apply for funding. Such limitations often overlap with timelines for when an individual may be seeking to start or building a family (Kossek & Lee, 2020). Even for grants that are not limited to early-career researchers, funding and deadlines can also be challenging for faculty with caregiving responsibilities. In acknowledging this structural barrier, some federal granting agencies and individual foundations have been taking action and revising policies to ensure that academic STEMM faculty with caregiving needs are able to take leave and extend their grants and eligibility for funding (see Chapter 4 for specific examples of these policies). Additionally, some federal agencies provide funding for childcare or replacement of faculty or staff on care leaves (Beckerle et al., 2011). Unfortunately, not all institutions make it easy for researchers to make use of this flexibility and without it, meeting grant deadlines can be a challenge.

Additionally, even informal policies and practices can reflect assumptions that disadvantage faculty, staff, and students with caregiving responsibilities (Ecklund et al., 2012; Sallee, 2012). Informal policies such as scheduling talks and meetings early or late in the day, expecting or encouraging time in the office or laboratory on the weekends or late at night, or policies limiting access to flexibility or asynchronous work or learning also may reflect and contribute to a culture that does not acknowledge caregiving responsibilities (Vos et al., 2021). Consideration of these care demands in work scheduling expectations and greater flexibility would ensure broader participation in these core research activities by faculty with care demands (Kossek & Lee, 2020, 2022).

STEMM faculty, graduate students, and postdocs and other trainees with caregiving responsibilities also find it difficult to attend conferences and engage in travel and networking that is often key to academic careers (Beckerle et al., 2011; Calisi & Working Group of Mothers in Science, 2018; Fuentes-Afflick et al., 2022; Lubitow & Zippel, 2014; Tower & Latimer, 2016; Winslow & Davis, 2016; Xu & Martin, 2011; Zippel, 2017). In another study, at least half of the full-time faculty with children at a large research university noted that lack of childcare meant that they were unable to plan or attend research-related travel, submit to a conference, or accept an invitation to give a talk; this effect

was stronger for those faculty who were partnered with another academic (Tower & Latimer, 2016).

IMPACTS OF COVID-19: EXACERBATING LONGSTANDING INEQUITIES IN THE PROVISION OF CARE

Although caregivers in academia have always faced substantial challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified and put a spotlight on these challenges with the nationwide disruption of schooling, childcare, and older adult care facilities (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). Early in the pandemic, researchers identified that while everyone was affected by the pandemic, certain groups were experiencing a disproportionate amount of pressure. Research showed that women, in particular, faced substantial work disruptions due to caregiving (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). At the same time, people of color, who generally experienced higher rates of COVID-19 and COVID-19-related deaths, were more likely to experience intensified caregiving for family members suffering from COVID-19, as well as to offer bereavement care (Aburto et al., 2022; Douglas et al., 2022).

In STEMM, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the hard-won progress toward greater gender equity in these fields. To quote a National Academies (2021) study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s research careers:

Several studies have documented the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on caregivers, particularly women, in STEMM. For example, one study of papers published in medical journals in 2019 and 2020, which compared authorship for papers about COVID-19 with papers in the same journal the previous year, showed a significant decrease in women’s engagement as first authors (Andersen et al., 2020). Similarly, a survey of 1,185 medical, graduate, and health professions schools at one university showed that women were more likely than men to consider going part-time or leaving employment during the pandemic, with the strongest effect among

women with children (Matulevicius et al., 2021). Both men and women with children were also more likely to consider going part-time or leave employment, and working parents as well as women were more likely to turn down leadership opportunities (Matulevicius et al., 2021). As Matulevicius and colleagues note (2021, 6):

Another fall 2020 survey of faculty at a large urban U.S. university system that includes 2- and 4-year institutions included 3,219 participants (Skinner et al., 2021). While all groups noted spending less time on research during fall 2020 than they expected, there were important gaps in research products by gender and caregiver status (Skinner et al., 2021). Early-career scholars were also more likely to note that their career options were being negatively affected by the pandemic (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021).

One of the most critical challenges during the pandemic was the increasingly “boundaryless” nature of work (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). While everyone in academic STEMM experienced a loss of boundaries between work and home, this challenge was particularly exacerbated for caregiving women who remained primary caregivers in many households (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). These problems were further exacerbated for mothers of children with disabilities, since in many instances the move to online classrooms could not fully meet the educational and developmental needs of these students (Schneider et al., 2021). These challenges led to a variety of negative outcomes regarding increased workload, decreased efficiency, and negative effects on personal well-being (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). Further, a national study of academic STEMM women found that when women faculty experienced disrupted boundaries and gender inequalities in the division of labor on and off the job, the result was a greater likelihood they felt the strain of not having enough support for caregiving. In turn, this led them to withdraw from their jobs, experience burnout, and contemplate leaving their occupation (Kossek, Perrigino, & Rock, 2021).

On April 10, 2023, President Biden signed a bill that ended the COVID-19 national emergency. But despite the pandemic’s official end, it

remains crucial to consider the lessons learned from this period. The disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on caregivers, and especially women caregivers, demonstrated how ill prepared STEMM educational and work environments are to handle such a disruption. The pandemic has highlighted the need for comprehensive policies and practices in support of caregivers in STEMM and made more visible the longstanding challenges in STEMM fields faced by caregiving students and professionals. It is critical that attention to these remain priorities in a postpandemic world. Moreover, reports indicate that the lingering effects of the pandemic remain; a member of the National Science Board observed that the pandemic may have set back U.S. women’s science careers permanently (Richmond, 2020).

BALANCING THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF IDEAL WORKER NORMS

Discussions of the challenges associated with current norms perhaps inevitably produce questions about whether the status quo has important benefits that we might lose if it were to change. As discussed throughout this chapter, there are substantial costs to the ideal worker status quo, in terms of long-term productivity, creativity, and health of those in academic STEMM, and on whether academic STEMM ends up selecting and promoting those with the greatest talent or those who can work a certain schedule. Some may argue, however, that ideal worker norms increase productivity because of returns to experience and long hours and, in this way, benefit the scientific enterprise by increasing scientific output.

Certainly, any set of norms comes with both potential benefits and potential costs. The committee, however, is not arguing that the appropriate response is to replace rigid norms of overwork with infinite flexibility. Instead, the key question is how to create academic STEMM careers that can still capture the benefits of intense focus on work while avoiding the documented costs in health, quality of work, and the exclusion of certain groups from the workforce in part through recognition of the value and importance of unpaid labor. Finding the optimal balance can include reconsidering the way metrics such as publications and citations are evaluated, thinking carefully about the timing of meetings and other deadlines, introducing policies that protect promotion opportunities for those who need to take leave such as stop-the-clock, and accepting the reality that all scientists—as human beings—have predictable and unpredictable needs to care and be cared for during certain periods of their lives. The committee

discusses these and other policies and practices that support family caregivers in the next several chapters.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS FROM CHAPTER 3

1. Together, we see that the broader cultural context in STEMM, which expects an ideal worker who can devote their full time and attention to work, with little to no outside demands, creates challenges for caregivers of all genders, both in terms of navigating time constraints and of facing potential bias and discrimination because of their caregiver status in the workplace. These cultural norms also set the stage for the structure and policies of academic STEMM in ways that can create greater challenges for family caregivers. And coupled with particularly intense expectations of devotion within academic STEMM, they additionally interact in significant ways with the uneven burden of family caregiving responsibilities by gender and race/ethnicity. All of this is further compounded by the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, with disproportionate impacts on caregivers, particularly women, women of color, and communities of color. The result is that those who are already most marginalized within academic STEMM fields are further marginalized for providing necessary care for family members and loved ones. Ideal worker norms in STEMM are characterized by an assumption that students and academicians will show devotion through working long hours, being constantly available and visible, and pursuing unbroken career trajectories. These norms shape cultural conceptions of how people should approach working and learning in STEMM and perpetuate rigid structures for career trajectories, daily work schedules, and research timelines in ways that amplify tensions with expectations of caregiving.
2. The expectations and structure of today’s academic STEMM workplace are harmful to all groups, but they have different consequences by gender. For women, they fuel assumptions that women are not ideal workers because they have caregiving responsibilities, and therefore are not qualified for professorial positions or for promotions. For men, they fuel pressures to work the same kind of hours and patterns as someone who has no ongoing responsibilities for daily care of others.

3. Maternal wall bias is particularly potent in academic STEMM because it is rooted in the culture of these fields. Widely held beliefs about merit in academic STEMM include beliefs that academic science is a vocation that demands and deserves single-minded “work devotion.” For mothers, far more so than for fathers, childbirth and childrearing are believed to violate their scientific excellence and devotion. The result is real and substantial financial loss, premature academic career pruning for women (e.g., choosing non-tenure-track positions, moving to industry), and a true voltage drop for STEMM academic productivity.
4. Women of color may be most affected by maternal bias. Racialized conceptions of motherhood, as well as distinct histories of caregiving along racial lines, shape the ways in which maternal wall bias is experienced by women of different races and ethnicities.
5. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified caregiving versus career challenges, including disruptions in schooling and childcare and in caring for sick relatives. Research shows that women faced substantial work disruptions due to caregiving, and faculty of color were more likely to experience intense caregiving for family members suffering from COVID-19, as well as loss. It demonstrated that current support for academic STEMM professionals with caregiving responsibilities was already broken.

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