Around the world rising mental health inequities between women and men following the COVID-19 pandemic pose a major public health problem. According to a new study, the lockdown measures due to the pandemic fundamentally and unequally damaged the work-family balance for many graduate students, increasing mental health concerns.
The study, published in Preventive Medicine Report, is one of the first to highlight gendered stresses and the significance of work-family conflict in the setting of a pandemic. The study was led by scholars from McGill University, Université de Montréal, and Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
“Mental health problems are particularly high among graduate students and our research suggests that the pandemic may have exacerbated these issues and some gendered inequalities,” says lead author Jaunathan Bilodeau, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Professor Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, the Canada Research Chair in Policies and Health Inequalities at McGill University.
Higher education was hurt badly by lockdown measures in Canada due to COVID-19. Universities and institutions closed their doors, requiring both teachers and students to work from home.
The analysis demonstrates that the COVID-19 lockdown measures were not gender-neutral. For example, women reported increased stress associated with adapting to new remote teaching methods. This was connected with increased depressive symptoms, not only directly, but also indirectly through job interfering with family. Women were also more anxious about COVID-19.
The difference between women and men, according to the researchers, could be linked to attitudes about risk and the care duties imposed by the pandemic. “Considering that many women in our survey had a close contact who contracted COVID-19, the mental load or caregiving linked to this concern could have had an unfavorable effect on the ability to reconcile work and family responsibilities among women,” says Bilodeau.
The study’s findings were consistent with prior publications demonstrating reduced emotional support among men in Quebec.
The survey also showed that men battled more often with family interfering with work. “Before and throughout the pandemic, there may have been gendered management of the borders between work and home life, which could be one plausible explanation. Before the pandemic, men may have had more segregated family and work duties. In an environment where the physical separation between family and work has been effectively eliminated by containment, it is possible that this segmentation has become more difficult to maintain, resulting in more perceived conflicts between family and work “explains Bilodeau.
Graduate students striving for an academic career are at heightened risks of work-family conflict generally, as they seek to create research and publishing records in a highly competitive atmosphere while also typically being demographically in the early phases of family creation, said Quesnel-Vallée. Being in a relationship, having children, being anxious about new teaching methods, and worrying about COVID-19 were all connected to higher work-family conflict.
“By adjusting and expanding assistance for those who work from home, our research reveals action levers that might be used to reduce mental health disparities among graduate students. Proactive mental health services and policies for balancing work and family obligations are examples of such measures “Nancy Beauregard, a Professor at the Université de Montréal’s School of Industrial Relations and a co-author of the study, explains why. Governments and universities should address these characteristics to lower the risk of depressive symptoms and mental health inequities during the pandemic, the researchers argue.