[...] Research has shown that stopping the tenure clock is an imperfect policy. According to a study of tenure decisions in economics departments published in 2018, men were substantially more likely to receive tenure at their first job after the university allowed an extension for new parents of either sex, while women were substantially less likely to receive tenure than they were before the policy change.

The reason, said Jenna Stearns, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the paper, is that men appear to devote more of the additional year to academic research, while women appear to spend more of it managing parental obligations.

There is evidence that the pandemic is having a similar effect, with the gender divide in new academic papers skewing more male in recent months.