This chapter focuses on the impact of domestic division of labor and research-related work patterns on women's happiness levels in academia since the beginning of the pandemic in Türkiye. Multilevel mixed effects generalized linear models demonstrate that while components related to unpaid domestic responsibilities have no statistically significant impact unlike expected, partner support has a meaningful positive effect. Worries regarding future career statistically significantly decrease the reported happiness levels, as support received from one's institution has an improving impact. Single predictor models show the diminishing influence of the negative effect pandemic had on research productivity and associated reactions from one's institution. Variance based on academic rank is only observed for the latter. Results refer to similar experiences of women in academia since the start of the pandemic regardless of academic rank and the significance of creating gender sensitive workplace policies in higher education to improve their well-being, especially in times of crises.
TopIntroduction
This study examines the impact of Covid-19 on women’s reported happiness levels in academia in Türkiye by mainly focusing on two aspects: domestic division of labor patterns and research-related work patterns. The literature extensively shows a declining pattern in happiness levels for women in academia (McDougal et al., 2022; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2021; Ronnie, du Plessis, et al., 2022). Indeed, 78.9% of the respondents in this study reported a pre-pandemic happiness score of 81 and over (out of 100), which was 46.3% since the beginning of the pandemic. This dramatic deterioration highlights the significance of examining the potential determinants of this phenomenon.
There are conditions and several factors keeping women behind men or posing challenges in the academic sphere, including unequal domestic division of labor patterns (Minello et al., 2021), careers breaks due to motherhood (Mason et al., 2013), and glass-ceiling in academia (Roberto et al., 2020). According to Council of Higher Education (Türkiye) (2021) statistics, there were 81.736 women in academia by 2021, which constitutes 45.4% of all academics in Türkiye, while the rate of female faculty members in the European Union is 43% (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2022). However, even though there is a relatively high share of women in academia in Türkiye, vertical and horizontal segregation patterns continue to prevail. While 51.3% of research assistants, 50.6% of lecturers, and 45.1% of assistant professors are women in this context, this rate is 40% for associate professors, and 32.6% for professors (Council of Higher Education Statistics, 2021), showing that structural barriers and the glass ceiling still exist in the Turkish academia (Hüseyinzade Şimşek & Öztürk, 2019). As underlined in the literature, these challenges for women in academia have been exacerbated during the pandemic globally, especially concerning increased workload and unpaid domestic work, and career concerns (AbuJarour et al., 2021; NASEM, 2021; Reardon, 2021).
The pandemic and new conditions it brought about did not affect everyone in the same way, and various groups were affected disproportionately based on social status, class, gender, age, and location. Consequently, pandemic measures have fundamentally changed physical working conditions of women in academia and their way of work, too, through blurring boundaries between work and home in terms of the intersection of household chores, childcare, and paid work (NASEM, 2021), which is expected to have an impact on their subjective well-being. The main questions of this chapter are how and to what extent shifting paid and unpaid work patterns have been affecting women’s happiness levels in academia in the Turkish context, and whether there is a variance in their reported happiness based on these predictors at the level of academic rank. Hence, implementing multilevel mixed effects generalized linear models, this chapter investigates the impact of increased paid and unpaid workload, support provided by one’s institution and partner, as well as changed research productivity and anxieties related to future career in relation to the Covid-19 process on women academics’ reported happiness levels since the beginning of the pandemic by taking academic rank into account.