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Even before COVID-19, Megan Frederickson had her hands full as the mother of a six-year-old boy and as a tenured professor managing a lab, grants and graduate students. Now, with kids out of school and daycare, things have become even more challenging – and Frederickson suspected she was not alone. 

“The scientist in me wondered whether I could measure the pandemic's effect on the productivity of male and female researchers,” she writes in 

Frederickson, an associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology in the ������Ƶ's Faculty of Arts & Science, conducted a gender analysis of papers submitted to pre-print servers for researchers in STEM subjects shortly before and during the COVID-19 lockdown. She found that the number of male pre-print authors is currently growing faster than the number of female pre-print authors, suggesting women are not getting as much research done as men during the pandemic.

There are no easy solutions to fixing the gender imbalances in care-giving and domestic labour, Frederickson notes. 

“I will remember to count my many blessings, because a few less papers is nothing compared to the lives and livelihoods lost because of COVID-19,” she writes. “But a part of me will always wonder what discoveries women scientists might have made were it not for this pandemic and the setback it is causing to the hard-won progress of women in STEM.”