Flexible working policies at universities that are designed to make work life easier for parents and carers can reinforce gendered parenting roles, according to a growing body of research published this year. For instance, when workplaces offer flexibility, women end up taking on a greater share of parenting than men.

Universities “have all these policies in place, and we see so many women in science,” that many people assume that women can participate in work as much as men, says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But “the problem is being solved with women carrying an extraordinary burden”.

Research has already established that parenthood has a greater impact on the careers of female academics than those of men. Sugimoto and her colleagues wanted to find out how much parenting academics do, and how that affects their productivity.

They surveyed more than 10,000 parent academics with academic or non-academic partners at universities and research organizations globally¹. They found that women in academia were more likely to be the lead parent and do most of the parenting. Even when women shared parenting or took a secondary role, what the authors call satellite parenting, women ended up doing more than men did when they were the satellite parent. The only task that men were consistently doing more than women was coaching their child’s sports team, says survey co-author Gemma Derrick, a meta-researcher at the University of Bristol, UK.

The team then wanted to understand why women in academia were doing more parenting. Sugimoto and her colleagues found that women used flexible working policies — such as being able to adjust their hours to work earlier or later in the day — to take on more parenting responsibilities². In academic couples, men, however, used the option of flexibility to justify why they did not do as much parenting as their female partner. For example, some men said that their partner chose to have a more flexible career to look after children.

A female academic from the United Kingdom wrote in the survey that work flexibility meant it was easy for their partner to rely on them “always being available” to help with the kids. Another academic from the United States said: “I have the flexibility to drop off, pick up kids, send them for all activities, and feed them. I have the flexibility to make up all the work time I give up during daytime at night, work till 2am or at least midnight.”

Sanjee Perera, a workforce researcher at the Adelaide University, Australia, says academia has the “illusion of flexibility” because researchers have more autonomy to fit work around parenting responsibilities. But researchers are expected to publish papers, secure external funding, supervise students, teach and attend conferences, she says. “It’s almost like an open-ended workload.”

Less committed

When men in academia attempted to use flexible working to parent more, they often faced belittling comments or impacts on their careers, says Derrick. The perception of parenting as a gendered responsibility is changing over time, she says. “The question is whether it’s changing fast enough,” she adds.

Another survey³ of 26 female academics in the United Kingdom, by Guoxin Ma, a workplace equity researcher at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester, UK, and their colleagues reported that flexible workplace policies, such as working from home or having adjustable working hours, made it harder for women to progress their careers after having children.

Some respondents said that they were seen as less committed to work because they worked from home, finished early or were part-time, while others said that they continued working while on leave because there was no one else to do their work.

Pandemic effects

Parenting became more equal in many households during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Sugimoto. Some couples looked after their children on alternating days or in ‘shifts’, particularly if one parent had fixed working hours. Flexible working arrangements existed before the pandemic, but now ‘hybrid working’ such as online teaching and meetings has became more normalized⁴.