Gender, Race and Parenthood Impact Academic Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: From Survey to Action

The Changes in the Daily Lives and Life Satisfaction of Female Academicians during the Pandemic Process

Objective: The new type of coronavirus (COVID-19) disease has more serious consequences and risks by gender and plays a role in biological, socio-cultural and behavioral differences. This process is particularly severe in terms of the problems faced by women and some disadvantaged groups. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of changes in the daily lives of female academicians on life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic process. Methods: The sample of this descriptive study consists of 178 female academicians who have been actively working at a public university in the northeast of Turkey between Oct 1, 2020 and Feb 1, 2021. The data of the research were collected by "Personal Information Form" and "Contentment with Life Scale". Descriptive statistics (percentage, frequency, average), Pearson product-moment correlation analysis, t-test, and ANOVA test were used to evaluate the data. Results: It was found that 83.1% of the female academicians preferred to stay at their own homes and 52.8% of them did not receive support while fulfilling their daily responsibilities during the pandemic process in which female academicians had to work and learn at home. The total score of the Contentment with Life Scale of female academicians was found to be 20.15 ± 6.95. Female academicians who participated in the study had moderate level of contentment with life. It was determined in the study that the increase in the time spent on academic development, academic studies, and themselves increased female academicians’ life contentment and was statistically significant (p˂0.05). It was found that increased time spent for housework decreased life satisfaction. Conclusions: It was determined that professional and individual development is quite significant in increasing life satisfaction in female academicians. That strategies that can increase female academicians life contentment should be developed and women who are sensitive and need to be protected should be supported more in this situation.

Challenges in Feeding Children Posed by the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Systematic Review of Changes in Dietary Intake Combined with a Dietitian's Perspective

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

To examine the evidence that the dietary quality of children changed between the period preceding the COVID-19 pandemic and the first year during the pandemic.

RECENT FINDINGS

A systematic review of the evidence for dietary changes occurring as a result of the pandemic-related restrictions, in Part I of this article, yielded 38 original research articles. These articles had conflicting results, some describing improvements in overall quality and some describing deteriorations. As a whole the studies were characterized by a low study quality, and children were poorly represented. Taken together, these studies do not provide enough evidence to draw conclusions about whether dietary habits changed or not as a result of the pandemic. However, in a wider, narrative review of the psychosocial changes occurring as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the known associations of these factors with a dietary intake in Part II, we conclude that there is a reason to expect that the dietary quality of children might have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. One the one hand, the literature fails to provide conclusive evidence on changes in the dietary quality of children resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the broader literature supports the hypothesis that children's dietary quality will have declined during the pandemic. Taken together, we urgently need more high-quality research on children's changes in dietary intake occurring over the pandemic. This will provide important information on whether any potential long-term consequences of such changes, if they exist, need to be examined and ameliorated.

Gendered Citation Practices in the Field of Communication

In disciplines outside of communication, papers with women as first and last (i.e., senior) authors attract fewer citations than papers with men in those positions. Using data from 14 communication journals from 1995 to 2018, we find that reference lists include more papers with men as first and last author, and fewer papers with women as first and last author, than would be expected if gender were unrelated to referencing. This imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices of men and is slowly decreasing over time. The structure of men's co-authorship networks partly accounts for the observed over-citation of men by other men. We discuss ways researchers might approach gendered citations in their work.

The first 12 months of COVID-19: a timeline of immunological insights

Since the initial reports of a cluster of pneumonia cases of unidentified origin in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the novel coronavirus that causes this disease - severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) - has spread throughout the world, igniting the twenty-first century's deadliest pandemic. Over the past 12 months, a dizzying array of information has emerged from numerous laboratories, covering everything from the putative origin of SARS-CoV-2 to the development of numerous candidate vaccines. Many immunologists quickly pivoted from their existing research to focus on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and, owing to this unprecedented convergence of efforts on one viral infection, a remarkable body of work has been produced and disseminated, through both preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals. Here, we take readers through the timeline of key discoveries during the first year of the pandemic, which showcases the extraordinary leaps in our understanding of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and highlights gaps in our knowledge as well as areas for future investigations.

Mentorship, equity, and research productivity: lessons from a pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic is more fully exposing ubiquitous economic and social inequities that pervade conservation science. In this time of prolonged stress on members of the research community, primary investigators or project leaders (PLs) have a unique opportunity to adapt their programs to jointly create more equitable and productive research environments for their teams. Institutional guidance for PLs pursuing field and laboratory work centers on the physical safety of individuals while in the lab or field, but largely ignores the vast differences in how team members may be experiencing the pandemic. Strains on mental, physical, and emotional health; racial trauma; familial responsibilities; and compulsory productivity resources, such as high-speed internet, quiet work spaces, and support are unequally distributed across team members. The goal of this paper is to summarize the shifting dynamics of leadership and mentorship during the coronavirus pandemic and highlight opportunities for increasing equity in conservation research at the scale of the project team. Here, we (1) describe how the pandemic differentially manifests inequity on project teams, particularly for groups that have been structurally excluded from conservation science, (2) consider equitable career advancement during the coronavirus pandemic, and (3) offer suggestions for PLs to provide mentorship that prioritizes equity and wellbeing during and beyond the pandemic. We aim to support PLs who have power and flexibility in how they manage research, teaching, mentoring, consulting, outreach, and extension activities so that individual team members' needs are met with compassion and attention to equity.

Dread in Academia – how COVID-19 affects science and scientists

In order to gain an insight into scholars’ concerns emerging from the COVID-19 crisis, we asked scientists from all over the world about their attitudes and predictions regarding the repercussions of this current crisis on academia. Our data showed that the academic world was placed in an unprecedented situation. Results further showed that everybody worked on-line, conducting studies was impossible or highly impeded, and lab work was difficult. Almost a quarter of all scientists participating in our survey were anxious about their scientific employment, and over 25% expected serious financial losses as a consequence of the pandemic. Moreover, we identified sex differences regarding the severity of the COVID-19 impact in the majority of questions. We inferred from this that women perceived to be in a worse situation than men.