MSU research shows women disproportionately affected by pandemic
by Carol Schmidt, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN – A team of Montana State University researchers have found that during the COVID-19 pandemic women have been disproportionately affected by mental load, workplace disruptions and impacts on daily life, especially women with children.
The team’s paper detailing their findings, “Women and the Weight of a Pandemic: A Survey of Four Western U.S. States Early in the Coronavirus Outbreak,” was published in the recent issue of the journal “Gender, Work & Organization.”
The paper’s lead author was Amber Raile, a professor in MSU’s Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship. Contributors included Eric Raile, David C.W. Parker and Elizabeth Shanahan, all professors in the Department of Political Science in the College of Letters and Science. Pavielle Haines, an MSU graduate who is a professor of political science at Rollins University, also contributed. The five researchers analyzed data from a web survey conducted in April in Montana, Utah, Colorado and North Dakota. At the time, the states had instituted varying approaches to the pandemic. Colorado and Montana had stay-at-home orders, North Dakota relied on individual responsibility and Utah had a middle ground approach, urging but not requiring staying at home.
Amber N. W. Raile, associate professor of management in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Montana State University, Monday, Feb. 12, 2018, in Bozeman, Mont.
MSU Photo by Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez
Amber Raile said that the researchers theorized that the results of the survey would indicate that women were more negatively impacted by the pandemic and resulting conditions than were male counterparts. However, the strength of the data supporting their theories surprised even the researchers.
“Not only were there very strong numbers that fit with our hypotheses, but the strong pattern of evidence was really striking,” she said. “Women were more nervous, more worried, there was more stress that women carried. This really quantifies it.”
The data for the paper was culled from a web-based questionnaire distributed by Parker, Eric Raile, Shanahan and Haines that asked questions about political preferences as well as opinions about the pandemic and related policies. The survey, funded by MSU’s Office of Research, Economic Development and Graduate Education and the Department of Political Science, included questions about worry, disruption, employment consequences, individual mitigation behaviors and attitudes toward health policy actions. Amber Raile, who specializes in work equity and women’s experiences in the workplace, thought the data might have applications to her work, and the other researchers agreed to share the data for a study specifically analyzing gender disparity.
Raile said she was in part motivated by her own experience as a mother who was working from home during the quarantine and sharing an office with her husband, Eric, while both taught remotely. Those challenges made her realize that the data were timely, holding importance to scholarly work about equity issues that transcended the pandemic.
“We were juggling kids and homeschool in another room. This mirrors our family experiences and a lot of family experiences in that time,” she said of what she calls a “never-ending shift” of the pandemic that has since become normal.
Raile and her fellow researchers developed six hypotheses that suggested women were more vulnerable to workplace disruptions and negatively affected by the pandemic. They also theorized that women were more likely to carry a heavy mental load than men and more subjected to work loss. Raile defines a mental load as the invisible work of managing household tasks and family commitments.
A final hypothesis proposed that neoliberal policy orientations — which she defines as policymaking that preferences deregulation, individual responsibility and free-market capitalism — that forced responsibilities onto individuals during the pandemic would more negatively impact women, but states with more social supports in place for women and families would help women navigate the early effects of the shutdowns.
Raile said that the survey data supported all the hypotheses; however, the researchers found no difference in women’s responses across states based on the general level of neoliberal policymaking.
In nearly every metric, women respondents expressed more negative effects on work, daily life and mental load. For example, nearly 68% of the women surveyed said they were stressed, as opposed to 50.2% of men. More than 80% of women said their lives had been disrupted, compared to 72% of men. Women were more likely to worry about others catching the virus (75 to 64%) than men as well as more likely to worry about an economic depression (82 to 74%).
Raile said the research validates the additional stress and disruption many women have felt throughout the pandemic.
“Women disproportionately experienced more stress and mental load,” she said. “They were particularly affected in early months, especially when they had children.”
Raile said that the survey is significant in that it quantifies the worry and mental load. The researchers’ hope is that it may lead to a first step in informing and helping organizations and government to formulate work equity policies.
“We hope the (research) contributes to a growing body of findings about the disproportionate impacts of crises on women,” she said. “When we see that this is a problem that is so widespread, it is a problem that society needs to solve.” •
