Women will be racing to catch up to men for the rest of their careers

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In March, I spoke to couples therapist Rachel Sussman about the toll that the coronavirus pandemic — and the resultant social isolation — was taking on relationships.

Sussman shared with me a story she heard from one of her clients, a woman with young kids. The woman's husband mentioned offhandedly that he scheduled a full day of work calls, and would be unavailable for childcare. The kids were home, since the coronavirus outbreak had forced schools to shutter and shift to online learning.

The woman was enraged. "I have conference calls, too!" she told her husband. "You can't do that without checking with me."

More often than not in mixed-gender relationships, it's the woman who winds up taking on additional childcare and housework. That can be true even if, as in the case of Sussman's client, both partners are still working full-time paying jobs.

A potential result is that women wind up falling behind in their careers. For the rest of their professional lives, they'll be racing to catch up.

Welcome to our first installment of Gender at Work.

In this twice-monthly newsletter we'll take a broad look at how your gender identity informs your career. We'll go beyond gender dynamics for those who are cisgender, addressing the experiences of nonbinary and transgender people as well.

I'm Shana Lebowitz Gaynor, a correspondent at Business Insider. I'll be here every other week with stories of high-achieving executives from underrepresented communities, new research on what it takes to narrow the gender pay gap, and advice on getting your startup funded when you don't look like every other founder.

Now, back to gender dynamics during the pandemic and how they might affect our careers.

Researchers at Emory and Harvard Universities recently published a working paper (which means it hasn't yet been peer-reviewed) that found female academics' productivity, in terms of how much research they published, decreased by an average of 13.9% relative to their male counterparts in the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States (March 11, 2020). "These short-term changes in productivity will affect long-term career outcomes," the authors write. And the disequilibrium in academia could be a microcosm of the broader business world.

There isn't one clear reason for the gender imbalance. One explanation (though hardly a justification), which The Atlantic's Helen Lewis wrote about, is that women tend to earn less than men on average. So their paying jobs may seem like less of a priority.

Crisis situations like the one we're in now can also expose our underlying assumptions about our relationships, namely the belief that women should handle family responsibilities and men should provide financial support. Even couples who don't typically live this way and wouldn't say explicitly that they hold these beliefs may revert to traditional gender roles in times of extreme stress and uncertainty.

And finally, our gender biases may be reinforced by employers who look askance on men who take time off from work to care for their family.

Jennifer Petriglieri, an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and the author of "Couples That Work," told me that businesses may be less understanding when a man asks to move a call because he'll be taking care of his kids than when a woman makes the same request. "There's more of a punishment," Petriglieri said. "The norm violation is stronger for the men than for the women." (It's worth noting that working fathers tend to earn more than men without children, while working mothers tend to earn less than women without children.)

Some leaders have presented possible solutions to the problem.

In an interview with Politico, Melinda Gates, who is cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Pivotal Ventures, said the reopening of the US economy hinges on better infrastructure for caregiving. As my colleague Marguerite Ward reported, Gates called on Congress to legislate more days for sick leave and caring for loved ones.

Meanwhile, the professional-services firm PwC added a crisis childcare reimbursement stipend to its suite of childcare solutions, Julie Peck reported for Business Insider. The total is up to $2,200. And Origin USA, which manufactures products rooted in grappling and mixed martial arts, turned the building where the company's original factory was into a childcare and enrichment program.

Couples can also take steps on their own to create an equitable division of labor. Petriglieri's family — she and her husband have two children, ages 10 and 11 — has been taking the first 10 minutes of dinner every night to share their priorities for the following day, whether those priorities involve work, school, or a personal pursuit.

I invite you to share personal stories about the link between your relationships and your career — and more broadly, the role that gender has played in your professional success. In the meantime, please share this newsletter with friends and colleagues. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here.

I'm also interested to know: Are there specific leaders or themes we should spotlight in this newsletter? Send suggestions to me at SLebowitz@BusinessInsider.com. I'm excited to read them.