Gendered disruptions in academic publishing during COVID‐19: Uncovering invisible labor at an anthropology journal

ABSTRACT

The COVID‐19 pandemic severely disrupted work patterns in academia. There is mounting evidence that men's publishing productivity increased while women's decreased. Yet most studies of this phenomenon have analyzed authorship and peer review data separately, without considering their interrelationship. We conceptualize authorship and peer review together as visible and invisible forms of labor, a lens that connects service work to other forms of gendered unpaid labor. Drawing on a data set of author and review activity at American Ethnologist from 2014 to 2021, we blend quantitative analysis with qualitative insights from our positions as the journal's editorial assistants. We find that in 2020 women performed staggeringly more service work than men relative to their rates of manuscript submission. Our findings disrupt the discourse of “a return to normal,” which ignores the differential effects of our collective pandemic experience.