Gendered Impacts Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On The Nuclear Workforce

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest resiliency challenge faced by the nuclear workforce in the 21st century. Impacts of the pandemic have been well quantified in terms of financial losses and diminished productivity; in April 2020 the unemployment rate in the United States reached an unprecedented peak of 14.8%. In June 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research xannounced that the United States had entered a recession, underlined by a 31.4% annualized decline in gross domestic product in the second quarter of the year. However, a growing body of research illuminates an insidious trend in these findings. Increasingly it has been shown that the pandemic’s impacts are stratified across lines of gender, with women’s employment losses accounting for 66% of the growth in unemployment in the spring of 2020, 63% in the summer, and 59% in the fall. Worldwide, the burden of unpaid care work has increased significantly. Many schools are operating remotely, and family members have taken on care responsibilities for elderly household members and those with disabilities or suffering from illness. Worldwide, women spend an average of 4.1 hours per day on unpaid care work compared to 1.7 hours per day for men. An increase in the volume of care work jeopardizes women’s ability to participate in paid work - initial studies show that women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to loss due to COVID-19 than those of men. The nuclear policy community is small and somewhat isolated from other sectors of the economy, but measures taken in response to COVID-19 were sweeping. To explore whether gender inequity in the nuclear policy community has been exacerbated by the pandemic, Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy launched an initiative to capture self-reported data. In the first quarter of 2021, a survey containing questions about workforce participation, care work responsibilities, and employment outlook was made publicly available and distributed through professional networks throughout the community. This paper will present results from responses submitted by over 200 members of the community in an effort to present impacts of the pandemic and unearth any exacerbation of gender inequity.