Research across many disciplines — economics, public health, sociology, biology, medicine, gender studies, and more — has documented Covid-19’s detrimental impact on women. Multiple papers have shown that women’s unpaid care work, including child care, home-school supervision, emotional support of household members, and all manner of domestic tasks, has increased more than men’s during the pandemic. While many faculty and staff members in North America have been lucky enough over the last year to be able to telecommute, working from home during a pandemic brings its own set of difficulties.

The pandemic has also revealed how deeply many of us still rely on socialized bonds of care — like public schooling and, in my case, free (albeit limited) after-school clubs for middle schoolers, along with low-cost, means-tested after-school care for elementary-school children. We need more of these socialized forms of care in ordinary times.

And Covid-19 has made stark what socialist and Marxist feminists have been arguing for years: The work of social reproduction takes more time than is available. As Nancy Fraser puts it, our political-economic structure “externaliz[es] care work onto families and communities while diminishing their capacity to perform it.” As Kathi Weeks explains, we need less work so that we can undertake the reproductive labor required to sustain our communities.

So what should academics and administrators do in the face of worsening inequality? First, we need to organize if we’re going to change the paired cultures of overwork and gendered inequity. Second, we must recognize that addressing discrepant caregiving loads during the pandemic, and the devaluing of reproductive labor in general, is beneficial for all female academics, childfree and parents alike. And finally, the published research is very clear: Institutional policies must not be gender neutral if they’re to be gender equitable.