The Gendered Analog-Digital Divide in Virtual Academia
Publikation aus Policies
Technologie, Innovation und Politikberatung
K. Grasenick, S. Beranek, A.-S. Godfroy, S. Reidl, P. F. Romero, H. Schiffbänker, J. Stadlbauer, J. Trattnig, A. Wolffram, C. Wächter
Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz 20th Annual STS Conference Graz 2022 „Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies, 12/2022
During the Covid-19 pandemic, in times of worldwide lockdowns, academic
careers were impacted in a gendered way (Gabster et al., 2020): Existing gender
inequalities have increased (Oleschuk, 2020) and female academics, especially early
career researchers, have conducted less research compared to men (Viglione, 2020;
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dropped radically. One might argue that the pandemic is over, and that academic life
is back to normal, leaving us with the benefits of improved tools and practices for virtual
collaboration. However, virtual academia risks increasing inequalities, an effect we will
refer to as the analogue-digital divide. These risks affect especially researchers at the
beginning of their career, and those who contribute to a greater extent to academic
and family care work, which are mainly women. In this paper, we reflect and
consolidate the findings of six projects with partners across Europe and two universities
which analysed the lasting effects of the pandemic from the perspectives of
researchers at different career stages, service staff, as well as decision makers in
boards and juries. We conclude that strategies and measures developed before the
Covid-19 pandemic do not consider virtual academia sufficiently. We thus suggest how
to counteract the analog-digital divide with requests of funding organisations and
implemented by research processing organisations in their gender equality plans
(GEPs).
Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic, gender inequalities, lasting effects, virtual academia, gender equality plan, GEP
Url: https://openlib.tugraz.at/download.php?id=63c66e9d837c4&location=browse