Sugimoto and Frederickson tell The Scientist they suspect that childcare duties, which have increased with the closure of schools and daycare facilities, are a significant factor driving this trend. Male academics have children too, but they’re four times more likely to have a partner who is a full-time caregiver than are female academics, who are more likely to have partners who also work outside the home. Women are also more likely to be single parents than men are. Even in relationships with two partners, both of whom are academics, there’s often an unequal division of labor. In a recent survey on parenting among academics, Sugimoto and her colleagues found that women tended to take on more childcare duties, even if couples insisted that the work is split evenly between them.

In terms of how the situation is playing out in the pandemic, a recent poll published by The New York Times suggests that the division of childcare isn’t equal between men and women. Among 2,200 respondents, around half of men said they were doing most of their children’s homeschooling over the past few months, whereas only 3 percent of women agreed that their partner was doing the bulk, the poll found.

Women also tend to take on domestic labor and the responsibility of caring for old or sick relatives, and some studies suggest that female academics do more teaching than men, on average, so perhaps the transition to online courses also affected women’s research productivity, Frederickson adds. An additional factor could be demographic, as many more men were hired as professors than women in the 1980s, and hiring women faculty only became more common in recent decades. “As a result of that, the average female faculty member at a university is younger than the average male faculty member. Just because of that, it’s possible that women are more likely to have kids at home than male faculty members,” she suggests.