Athens, 16th of May 2022
Press Release
Online Lecture
“‘All the single ladies’ as the ideal academic during times of COVID‐19?”
On the 6th of April 2022, the Centre for Gender Studies of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences organized an online lecture for the ProGender project entitled “‘All the single ladies’ as the ideal academic during times of COVID‐19?”. The lecture was given by Ea Høg Utoft, Postdoc at the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy (CFA), Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.
She began her lecture by analysing some of the difficulties experienced by working women, due to the shift of working spaces from their offices to the home and the burden of additional caring responsibilities, which resulted in career disadvantages and gender inequalities. She then focused on the difficulties that single academics, without caring responsibilities (children and vulnerable people) faces, as they had to cope with rising pressures to achieve higher levels of academic productivity. She presented an ethnographic study in which she analyzed her own experiences of working from home, focusing on four aspects of this novel condition:
- The academic productivity, as a premise of the neoliberal university, which in the period of the Covid-19 quarantine was transformed into what she called “toxic” productivity.
- Τhe lack of work-life balance, as working time increased and took over time spent at home, effectively turning it into an office.
- Τhe ideal of the academic, who is dedicated to work and research with no other commitments, obscuring the fact that there may be more than work and family.
- The excessive anxiety and stress, which emerged as a result of all these pressures.
The lecture concluded with some considerations of gender inequalities in times of Covid-19 and the ways in which they affect academic hierarchies and research outcomes.
The video of the lecture is available on Facebook @ProGenderproject and on the website
ProGender: A Digital Hub on Gender, the Covid-19 Crisis and its Aftermath, is funded by the Bilateral Fund of the European Economic Area (EEA) Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 (EEA Grants 2014-2021). In the ProGender project the Centre for Gender Studies of Panteion University cooperates with the RIKK- Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference of University of Iceland and the Center for Gender Research of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the AMKE Research and Education Collective (REC) and the Social Cooperative Enterprise KOINSEP STIN PRIZA.
