Experts worry that without proper intervention, faculty careers could be destabilized for years to come, especially those of women and people of color. In normal times, women were already more likely to perform service work for their departments and rank lower in the academic hierarchy. Faculty of color generally spend more time mentoring students of color and performing other forms of “invisible labor,” or work that isn’t recognized in the typical faculty-reward structure. With the most recent rise of the racial-justice movement, demands on those scholars have only increased.

Those disparities, baked into the system, have been amplified by the pandemic, says Cassidy R. Sugimoto, a professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington who is studying women’s article submissions in the wake of Covid-19. When colleges and K-12 schools went remote, suddenly, child care and other domestic duties were disproportionately shunted onto women’s shoulders. Plus, students now need more support — and teaching takes more time — than ever. As a result, many scholars who were already the emotional glue of their academic communities have had little to no time to produce research, to plant the seeds that normally bear scholarly fruit months or years into the future.

Fortunately, many people are thinking through what changes need to be made to keep women and people of color, especially, in academe. [This article shares] some of them. (Though interventions are needed to support adjunct instructors, many of whom have lost work during the pandemic, these strategies mainly focus on the needs of tenured, tenure-track, and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members.)