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Stay-at-home-orders, online learning, and work from home policies are some of the responses governments, universities, and other institutions adopted to slow the spread of COVID-19. However, research shows these measures have increased pre-existing gender disparities in the workplace. The working conditions for women during the pandemic worsened due to increased family care responsibilities and unequal distribution of domestic labor. In the academy, working from home has resulted in reduced research time and increased teaching and family care responsibilities, with a larger proportion of that burden falling to women. We investigate the persistence of gender inequity among academic scientists resulting from university COVID-19 responses over time. We draw on two surveys administered in May 2020 and May 2021 to university-based biologists, biochemists, and civil and environmental engineers, to analyze how the pandemic response has disproportionately impacted women in academia and the endurance of those inequities. Results show significantly greater negative impacts from the pandemic on women’s research activities and work-life balance, compared to men. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results, and the need for the academy to better predict and adjust to the gender disparities its policies create.

Legal mandates are a common mechanism to stimulate government agencies to engage the public. Research shows managerial efforts can also affect civic engagement. We first examine whether local government departments that are legally mandated to engage the public have more public participation than departments that are not mandated to do so. We then explore the relationship between manager perceptions of public participation and the frequency of public participation. Finally, we analyze the interactive effect of legal mandates and managerial perceptions. To investigate our research questions, we use regression models on data from a 2018 nationally representative survey of 527 local government managers in the United States. The results indicate legal mandates are not significantly related to public participation, but managerial perceptions are a key factor. These findings support pursuing a managerial approach to advance public participation in local government.

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