Government–stakeholder interaction has been transformed due to some developments, putting stakeholders into a proactive role. However, there are barriers before this transformation, like an administrative burden. This burden's volume and relative weight could have increased in particular periods, like the pandemic. In this context, college students faced many difficulties, and uncertainties prevailed. This article focuses on a new administrative burden on undergraduate students in a particular country. This study aims to examine the administrative burden brought by the measures taken during the pandemic period on students by focusing on the psychological dimensions based on gender. At the end of the research, as expected, the authors saw that both female and male students underwent a psychological based administrative burden. Yet, since the imposition of gender inequality, female students have had a more significant workload due to studying at home, so they were affected more negatively throughout this process.
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The relevant literature argues that the pandemic's most essential and long-standing effect is on education (Onyeaka et al., 2021) if healthcare services are put aside (Verhoeven et al., 2020). When looking at the extant literature, there are many studies on the administrative burden. These studies examine factors that cause inequalities among those served (Hattke et al., 2020; Atlam et al., 2022; Baltà-Salvador et al., 2021) with a particular dimension. Students (Sundarasen et al., 2020; Hasan & Bao, 2020) and teachers/lecturers (Cheng & Lam, 2021) have been affected by this process from the beginning until now. This affection is due to various reasons, including those effects coined by the term administrative burden.
Many studies concern the administrative burden (Jenkins & Nguyen, 2022; Ali & Altaf, 2021; Chudnovsky & Peeters, 2021). These are growing by volume lately because of attraction to that enduring issue in public administration scholarship. However, there is a lack concerning studies focusing on administrative burden and its augmentation by cause of significant events like pandemics. We see that cases are causing additional inequality and inequity due to the government agencies’ preferences, which might increase shareholder discrimination. This discrimination, mainly based on gender and the other burdens created by the pandemics, might have produced enormous side effects. These side effects on college students and faculty fellows, particularly women (Dogra & Kaushal 2022), are mainly psychological, economic, and about the sense of identity.
Although there are many studies on the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still a void regarding the psychological side effects of online education on college students. We argue that this somehow exemplifies a commonly neglected side of administrative burden. In Turkey, the Council of Higher Education (CoHE) is a central public institution to which all public and foundation universities are administratively subordinates. The administrative burden was that university administrations, as a part of the executive branch, had proven themselves aligned with a decision in favor of passing online education taken by CoHE. Pamukkale University was one of the public universities that had supported the passing of online education through its Senate, the high decision body of the university. During all these three consecutive semesters as faculty fellows, we had seen minimal support, if not none, given by the university administration to the students, particularly those who had enrolled in the theoretical courses. The female students among them could have suffered more, considering various loads of duties due to gender differentiation. Previous research (Hall, 1972; Herman & Gyllstrom, 1977) shows that women experience more role conflict than men. While women bear multiple roles simultaneously, men are about to have various parts in running sequentially. Indeed, the most common form of role conflict stems from role overload and the simultaneous demands of diverse role needs. Women's domestic roles have always been more significant than men’s. Thus, female students who study at home become more open to role conflict. We have decided to shed light on this type of administrative burden, mainly focusing on its psychological side effects on college students from a gender perspective. When we evaluate the psychological side effects of homeschooling students, we see that factors such as role conflict in the context of gender differences are even more critical.