The impact of Covid-19 on female faculty productivity in postgraduate science humanities at UFS (2019-2021)

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit various sectors of working society, mainly education and teaching. The difficulties with women's scientific productivity at the university, which faced the overload of domestic and family work, were accentuated in the home office model. The general objective of the work was to understand how the Coronavirus pandemic - Covid-19 -, impacted the productivity of teachers in graduate programs in the areas of Human Sciences at UFS. The qualitative-quantitative methodology was adopted in the interpretation of quantitative information and qualitative data through observation, participatory interaction, and analysis of the subjects' discourse. We studied the productivity of 72 professors, from ten master's and doctoral programs, with ties to undergraduate degrees in the period from 2019 to 2021. Data were collected in the institutional portal of UFS and in the Lattes Curriculum of CNPq. It was identified that only one program had female production severely impacted by the effects of the pandemic, constituting 10% of the sample, while 40% of the professors managed to maintain a constancy with lower rates. Approximately 20% have resumed growth after a sharp drop and 15% were already showing low productivity before the pandemic. The highlight occurred with 15% of teachers who raised their levels a lot. The result reports the overload of work at home, illness, loss of meaning, isolation, and the vision of production as therapy of disconnection from the reality of fear and death experienced in the world. Given the low quantitative representation of women in some departments and graduate programs, it is necessary to adopt institutional public policies to strengthen the presence of women in teaching, their research and scientific productivity in higher education, as well as monitoring the change of exclusionary behaviors by men who occupy the status quo in the university.