APC/GSWS Statement on the Covid-19 Closure, Care Work, and Health Disparities

May 13, 2020

As COVID 19 continues to reshape our lives, members of the GSWS/APC community take this opportunity to acknowledge the ways that responses ranging from the federal government, to schools, to households, fail to consider how gender, race, sexuality, and class are shaping people’s experiences of this crisis. From the increased care burden on women who are forced to bear the brunt of work from home policies, to the shockingly disparate rates of infection and death from COVID 19 along racial lines, this unprecedented crisis is laying bare the gender, race, and class imbalances that have shaped this country from its founding.
Feminist scholars have long analyzed the devaluation of care work, which is coupled with the unequal distribution of burdens along racial, class, and gendered lines in both the formal economy and the household. Put simply: women bear the brunt of care work at all levels. Women paid for care work (as nannies, domestic workers, and home health aides) are both disproportionately women of color or from immigrant communities and paid poorly because of the devaluation of care work in the economy. Women who are afforded the ability to work from home tend to be unequally burdened by the well-documented “double-shift” wherein women take on the bulk of household responsibilities even when they also work in the formal economy.
The COVID 19 crisis puts these disparities into stark relief in several ways. The first divide separates those who are able to keep their jobs from those who cannot, and the second separates those who are able to “work from home” from those who must risk exposure to go to workplaces. Workers in essential industries and gig economy workers, including home health aides, nannies, domestic workers, and people working in service industries, risk increased exposure to the virus. Data from nearly every geographical region, and particularly from urban areas of the United States point to clear patterns: these workers tend to be African-American, Latinx, and other historically marginalized groups. Intersecting with the impact of these patterns, one in three women are defined as engaging in “essential” work under pandemic guidelines. These are the workers who are deemed “essential” in this moment: workers who very often do not make a living wage, do not have health care or other benefits, and, crucially, do not have paid sick leave. In 2014, for instance, over half of home care workers in the US relied on some form of public assistance (PHI 2016)
At the university, staff and faculty are under deep pressure to continue to function (somewhat) smoothly during this crisis, but also to care for their own family members, meanwhile dealing with huge increases in household tasks -- everything from new and labor-intensive homeschooling expectations to several additional hours of cleaning and cooking required each day under quarantine. These burdens are severe for single parents, decreasing time for “work” related activities and increasing the potential for burnout and/or other mental health challenges. The glaring conflict between performing “economic” work simultaneously with carework has not been addressed in a comprehensive way by anyone--neither at the level of federal or state governments nor by the administration at most universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, leaving employees at the mercy of empathetic (or not) direct supervisors to try to negotiate these competing priorities.
In university communities, the added caregiving burden is particularly acute for graduate students. In addition to the stresses of helping to move courses online as TAs and instructors (without an increase in wages) and re-working their research plans and grant proposals in response to COVID-19 travel restrictions, graduate students with caregiving responsibilities are not being given the appropriate accommodations needed to attend to all of these changes. Here at Penn, graduate student parents have been informed that there will be no policy from the Provost that requires faculty to give special consideration to students with caregiving responsibilities, again leaving caregivers at the mercy of an empathetic (or not) professor, advisor, and/or chair.
More broadly, COVID 19 has laid bare some of the chronic inequities in the education system, disparities which again, fall along race and class lines. The challenges faced by first generation students and students in historically marginalized groups are many: from accessibility issues for online learning to lack of secure housing. For some students in the LGBTQ community, going “home” has meant going back in the closet and/or losing community that affirms their identity. For staff at universities, we have already begun to see the effects of salary and hiring freezes, which will no doubt impact those who are already struggling. There is also a note of disparity even within these policies at the university level. For non-standing faculty and graduate students, there is an additional layer of precarity resulting from a shrinking pool of jobs in higher education and the deprioritization of funding for lecturers and other non-tenured positions.
COVID 19 is also exposing and deepening gendered and raced disparities in health outcomes and access to healthcare. Historically, African-American, immigrant, Native American and economically marginal white communities have had limited access to quality healthcare. This disparity in access to care compounds the impact of other factors that determine health. Impediments to safe and affordable housing, poor air quality, a lack of education beyond high school, and financial insecurity can all contribute to ill health. In addition, many marginalized communities suffer from underlying chronic health problems. People in these already vulnerable communities face financial disaster as a consequence of shutdowns that have cost them their jobs. Others jeopardize their already compromised health to continue working in occupations that require continued risk of exposure to the virus. Six feet of social distance and work from home are luxuries they cannot afford. Conditions such as these compound the precariousness of life and have resulted in a disproportionate rate of infections and deaths from the COVID-19 virus in African American communities. Immigrant communities have also suffered disproportionately, and for undocumented immigrants this suffering includes a very real fear of arrest and deportation when seeking medical assistance. Native American communities are bracing for a wave of illness projected to overrun limited Indian Health Service resources. The global pattern of higher mortality for men from COVID-19, while potentially valuable for opening up new understandings of the social dimensions of the virus’s lethality, has sparked hypotheses about gendered behaviors that need further scrutiny along the intersectional lines of race, class, and the unequal impact of unhealthy environments. It is further worth stressing that the university community and African-American, immigrant, and Native American communities are not mutually exclusive and those of us within and of those communities may be dealing with compounding stressors that make our university work even more challenging.
Nursing, which remains a largely gendered workforce, comprises the frontline of this epidemic, alongside other healthcare workers. Across social media and mainstream network coverage, nurses and other healthcare providers are labeled as heroes, yet many are required to improvise their own personal protective equipment, stretch scarce resources, and maintain patient care while also exposing their own families as they travel back and forth between home and work. In addition to extended hours at work and caring for patients with and without COVID-19, nurses and caregivers often face increased care work at home. Some have become sick or have died as a result of caring for those who have COVID-19. At this time, nurses and caregivers face additional burdens at work, including the emotional labor of caring for patients who can no longer have their friends or family at the bedside. It is also worth noting that nurses have been confronting social isolation protesters as a consequence of advocating for the public to observe isolation guidelines in order to curb the surge of COVID-19 cases. While caregivers are being recognized in this current moment, this pandemic should prompt reflection on the need to respect caregivers and provide them with the appropriate protection and compensation once the pandemic is over.
Clearly the remedies needed to address the disparities outlined above go beyond the authority of institutions like the university. We need deep and far-reaching changes to the way that our society supports caregivers, parents, workers, students, and victims of economic disaster and illness. It is our firm belief that these long standing discrepancies must be addressed in a comprehensive way by federal and state governments. But in the meantime, we call on our communities at Penn to acknowledge that our positions in our households intersect with our positions in the academic and wage-earning worlds, often intensifying the impact of COVID closures and work-from-home orders. The current work-from-home circumstances cannot be sustained.
Signed,

Gwendolyn Beetham, Associate Director, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program
Shana Bahemat, Program Coordinator, GSWS & APC
Maria Murphy, Interim Associate Director, Alice Paul Center
Kathleen Brown, David Boies Professor of History and Director, GSWS & APC
Melissa E. Sanchez, Donald T. Regan Professor of English
Adam Sax, PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature
Jessa Lingel, assistant professor, GSWS & Annenberg School for Communication
David Azzolina, Academic Engagement Librarian
Karen Redrobe, Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media; Director, Wolf Humanities Center
Archana Kaku, PhD Candidate, Political Science
Josephine Park, Professor of English and Asian American Studies
Yara M. Damaj, PhD Student, Political Science
Catherine Bryson Professor of English
Suvir Kaul, A M Rosenthal Professor of English
Nancy Bentley, Donald T Regan Professor of English
Emily Steinlight, Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English
Linda H. Chance, Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature
Ricardo A. Bracho, Abrams Artist-in-Residence, GSWS & APC
David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English
Zachary Lesser, Professor of English
Raka Sen, Doctoral Student, Sociology
Angelina Eimannsberger, Ph.D. Student, Comparative Literature
Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English
Toni Bowers, Professor of English
Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English
Sheila Murnaghan, Allen Memorial Professor of Greek, Classical Studies
Wendy Grube, Director, Center for Global Women’s Health, Practice Associate Professor, Nursing
Gabriel Salgado, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science
Matty Hemming, Ph.D Student, English
Nancy J. Hirschmann, Stanley I Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences
Alicia Meyer, Ph.D. Candidate, English
Mark Bookman, Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Davy Knittle, Ph.D Candidate, English
Maja Sidzińska, Ph.D. Student, Philosophy
Riley McGuire, Ph.D. Candidate, English
Rovel Sequeira, Ph.D. Candidate, English
Audrey Jaquiss, Ph.D. Student in Political Science
Ethan Plaue, Ph.D. Student, English
Ava Kim, PhD Candidate, English
Shoshana Adler, Ph.D Candidate, English
Herman Beavers, Professor of English, Africana Studies
Nat Rivkin, Ph.D. Student, English
Robin Leidner, Associate Professor of Sociology
Max Cavitch, Associate Professor, English
Hilary R. Whitham, PhD Candidate, History of Art
Aylin Malcolm, Ph.D. Candidate, English
Marie Gottschalk, Professor of Political Science
Siyen Fei, Associate professor of History
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities
Andrew T. Lamas, Urban Studies (SAS) & NonProfit Leadership (SSPP)
Hannah LeClair, Ph.D. Student, Comparative Literature
Siarhei Biareishyk, Visiting Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Jess Shollenberger, Ph.D. Candidate, English
Kevin M. F. Platt, Russian and East European Studies
Anita Allen, Vice Provost for Faculty and Professor of Law
Sarah Carson, Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology
Mike Gadomski, Ph.D. Student, Philosophy
Kristina Mitchell, PhD Candidate, Hispanic and Portuguese Studies
Cassandra Dula, J.D./M.S. Candidate, Penn Law/Department of Criminology
Kim Fernandes, PhD student, Education and Anthropology logy
Aisha Chughtai, PhD Student, Anthropology
Andre Dombrowski, Associate Professor, History of Art
Veronica Brownstone, PhD Student, Hispanic and Portuguese Studies
Frances Rodriguez, J.D. Candidate, Penn Law
Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, PhD Student, Comparative Literature
Hanne Harbison, Lecturer, School of Nursing
Rebecca Naegele, Master of Fine Arts candidate
Litty Paxton, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, Annenberg School
Dawn Teele, Assistant Professor, Political Science
Eilidh Beaton, PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Sarah H. Kagan, Professor C-E, School of Nursing
Clare Whitney, PhD, School of Nursing & Dept of Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Kristen R. Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies
Isaac Rabbani, PhD Student, Economics
Bethany Monea, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Education
Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and Education
Rosemary DuBrin, PhD Student, Political Science
Dagmawi Woubshet, English
Lisa Miracchi, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Hanyu Ma, PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Allauren Forbes, PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Sara Purinton, PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Dana Khromov, PhD Candidate, Romance Languages
Amy Hillier, Associate Professor, School of Social Policy & Practice
Fariha Khan, Associate Director, Asian American Studies
Julia Bloch, Director, Creative Writing Program
Dixon Li, PhD Candidate, English
Sophie Hochhaeusl, Architecture
Devin William Daniels, PhD Candidate, English
Serena Mayeri, Professor of Law and History, Law School
Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Kathy Hall, Associate Professor, GSE
Dorothy Roberts, University Professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology
Toni Bowers, Professor, English, SAS
David Kazanjian, English and Comparative Literature, SAS
Rupa Pillai, Senior Lecturer, Asian American Studies
Peter Van Do, Lecturer, Asian American Studies
Bethany Wiggin, Faculty Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and Associate Professor of German