In some fields, studies show, the proportion of female authors on preprints, submitted manuscripts, and published papers dropped during the first few months of the pandemic. Mothers also suffered a 33% larger drop in research hours compared with fathers, according to a global survey of 20,000 Ph.D. holders published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper last month. The survey, conducted from May to July 2020, also found that mothers took on more household and child care duties than fathers.

But the news isn’t all dire: One funding agency recognized and corrected for a gender disparity early on in the pandemic. In February 2020, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) offered funding for COVID-19 research. The agency wanted to address the fast-growing issue quickly, so researchers were given an unusually short time to submit proposals—just 8 days. This was before lockdowns were imposed in Canada, but the gender disparity in the responses highlight underlying challenges female academics face: Only 29% of the resulting proposals were led by women, a drop of roughly seven percentage points compared with previous comparable funding opportunities.

“As soon as we got the numbers we went, ‘Oh my goodness, we did something wrong,’” says Cara Tannenbaum, scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at CIHR. When the agency offered a second round of COVID-19 funding 2 months later, it extended the deadline to 19 days and reduced the paperwork requirements. The number of proposals by women jumped to 39%, as Tannenbaum and her co-authors describe in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.