In their recent survey of 1,003 fellow political scientists in the U.S. and abroad, Marijke Breuning, Christina Fattore, Jennifer Ramos and Jamie Scalera found that both men and women remain concerned about their personal productivity during the coronavirus pandemic. Both women and men “perceive the pandemic as disruptive to their ability to write and conduct research and both worry about their own productivity,” the researchers said in a preliminary write-up of their results posted to the American Political Science Association's APSA Preprints platform. “The differences between women and men are not statistically significant.”

Rather than gender, the researchers found that the biggest productivity gap during the pandemic might be between parents and nonparents.