Pandemic, Motherhood and Science at Brazil’s Federal University of Pampa

Aline Teresinha Walczak and Fabiane Ferreira da Silva study women faculty at Brazil’s Federal University of Pampa. In October 2020 an online questionnaire went to 440 women across ten campuses and received 89 responses. The exploratory qualitative study considers how faculty who are mothers navigated remote teaching, research and care.

Three kinds of work at home

Some respondents describe preparing to teach in new ways while continuing to attend meetings and supervise students, alongside caring for children. Bringing all these activities into one place does not make the time available for them interchangeable. Academic deadlines can coincide with children’s needs, making uninterrupted research time especially difficult to secure.

The article reports that 94 per cent of respondents identified as white. This matters when reading how academic demands travel into a home. Access to help with housework, work equipment and private space may differ across racial and economic positions. The survey can show pressures faced by the people who answered it. Assessing how those resources vary requires a study designed to make those comparisons.

Treating every pressure as a problem of time management would obscure the university’s expectations for output and the family’s distribution of time for paid work. Accounts of exhaustion and guilt show how an institution’s standards can enter a person’s own judgment of whether she is doing enough.

Research needs stretches of time

Read the accounts of remote work with an eye to what can be rescheduled. Lesson preparation may move into the evening. A supervision meeting needs a time that works for everyone. A young child’s immediate need follows neither timetable. The accounts help distinguish total hours from stretches of time one can control. If teaching, meetings and care take the fixed slots, the uninterrupted attention required for analysis and writing may come out of sleep or disappear altogether.

This suggests a way to examine annual performance reviews. Two members of staff may face the same deadlines while differing in whether they can pay for care, share it with a partner or finish academic work during the day. The article uses national evidence on unpaid labour for context. Those figures describe a different population from the respondents at Pampa. The survey accounts show how disruptions were experienced. To assess how the university handles them, look separately at the periods covered by evaluations and the support available to those affected.

The voluntary responses at one university illuminate experiences. They cannot estimate a nationwide effect, and the 89 responses are not all a subsample of mothers. Read the six-country study of earnings after a first child alongside it to distinguish changes visible in earnings records from losses of time and health that appear in accounts of daily life.

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