Women’s Experiences in Academia During the Pandemic: A Narrative Inquiry

Manasi Thapliyal Navani & Shivani Nag | pp. 9-34

Abstract:
The academic profession requires a consistent immersion into the realm of ideas, scholarship, and an extended engagement beyond the classroom. In such a context, the distinction between the spaces of home and work is already blurred. Feminist scholarship shows that the responsibility of care in academia is already deeply gendered. The transformation of home into the workspace during the pandemic not only brought attention to the asymmetrically gendered division of labour but also intensified it. This paper explores how academic roles and identities are gendered and how they were experienced during the pandemic through the narrative accounts of six women academics in Delhi. This narrative inquiry focuses on how—in the context of the pandemic—identities and responsibilities for women in academia came to be gendered and engaged with the notion of care in pedagogy and scholarship. Our findings highlight that while some participants were facilitated by the greater flexibility that came with working from home in terms of being able to focus on their health, childcare, and avoiding a career break during pregnancy and postnatal care, they also pointed towards the lack of institutional flexibility in responding to a gendered experience of the workplace and the achievement of their academic goals. This paper underlines the significance of (a) having a physical workspace for a dialogic interpersonal pedagogy, (b) having a distinct professional identity as an “escape” from essentialised care demands at home, and (c) being part of a community of practice which is integral to women’s sense of being in academia.

Keywords : Pandemic, gendered workspaces, women in academia, communities of practice