New NYKids Study Reveals Gendered Impacts of Pandemic on Educator Workforce

By, Aaron Leo & Kristen C. Wilcox

“We must do more to support students and teachers in our state and encourage a new generation to enter the field of education so that New York never again faces the chronic staffing shortages we are seeing today.”

– Governor Hochul (on Rebuilding New York’s Teacher Workforce)

As educator workforce shortages continue to deepen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, plans to address these shortages in New York state include providing incentives for teachers to enter or stay in the workforce.

How educators experienced the pandemic differently and what these differences imply in terms of incentives for them to enter or stay in the profession is an open question.

As described in previous blogs, NYKids conducted a two-phase study investigating educator’s responses to the pandemic. NYKids’ recent publication in Community, Work, and Family reports on our analysis of the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on educators in New York state.

This study adds to the emerging research pointing to the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on women. This study, one of few studies focusing specifically on educators, also found that educators who identify as women experienced the pandemic more negatively than their male counterparts.

The Study

As discussed in previous blog posts, this study drew on survey findings from over 700 educators in 38 schools throughout New York state. We sought to understand differences in experiences and impacts on educators from different demographic backgrounds and who worked in varied contexts.

To better understand the impacts on educators with children, we included a survey question that asked educators whether they had childcare responsibilities. We used statistical analysis techniques to compare the responses of female and male educators with and without childcare responsibilities to better understand how the pandemic impacted educators differently.

Gender, Stress, and Work-Life Balance 

Several important findings emerged from our analyses:

• Female educators experienced higher levels of COVID-related and work-related stress and reported more severe struggles to balance work and family responsibilities than their male counterparts.
• Women with childcare responsibilities experienced similar levels of stress and work-life balance challenges as women without childcare responsibilities.
• Gender disparities were more closely related to work- and COVID-related stressors than their responsibilities as child caregivers.
• The severity of stress and work-life balance challenges was higher among educators who experienced interruptions to their employment, income, or social supports.

While these findings demonstrated that women were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, open-ended survey responses showed that men were not immune to the impacts of the pandemic.

For instance, both male and female educators described work-related stress and challenges in balancing the responsibilities of work and family. As a male teacher wrote:

 One of the biggest stressors has been the work/life balance. I’ve had to put my own children in questionable situations so I can work, such as leaving them home unsupervised and not being available to help with their remote learning. 

Similarly, a female explained the challenge of meeting the demands of work and parenthood during the pandemic:

The amount of guilt having to choose daily between how I perform as a teacher to serve others’ children and my school district’s mission and the quality of love and meeting the very basic needs of my own children was and still is very painful.

What Needs to be Done to Support Women Educators?

While this research is not without limitations due to sample size and inherent bias in retrospective surveys, this study and other COVID-19 research suggest that the pandemic has exacerbated gender inequalities in a number of ways, with implications for policy and practice:

• The difficulties that educators in this study experienced balancing their roles and responsibilities as parents and teachers could mean a “crisis of care” as growing numbers of dual-earner families are unable to afford childcare costs without one parent sacrificing their jobs. This childcare crisis is a major barrier for many workers, disproportionately effecting women workers.
• These study findings draw attention to causes behind the teacher shortage impacting school districts across New York state, the country, and the world. Because work-related stress is associated with burnout and turnover, this research suggests that educator workforce shortages may deepen particularly among female educators who are not provided sufficient support to manage stress.

You can access the full text of this article here or reach out to nykids@albany.edu for a copy.

Also please visit our website for other NYKids research and contact us if you have interest in having a NYKids team member present research or assist with school improvement planning.

Finally, we encourage you to connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or by email at nykids@albany.edu.