Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Volume 72, Issue 6, 1703-1716
Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between
students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has
exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and
race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of
childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have
disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to
work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women
law faculty were more likely to feel the effects of the financial exigencies that universities and
law schools faced during the pandemic because of their disproportionate representation in
non-secure, meaning non-tenure-stream, faculty positions. Furthermore, the rapid switch to
remote teaching and learning, particularly during spring 2020, had a more detrimental effect
on women in part because of the persistent gender bias that women law faculty, who teach a
larger percentage of required and survey courses, encounter in student teaching evaluations
and in part because women tend to be more engaged in the mental health and emotional
caretaking of students, which significantly increased during the pandemic. Even the actions
that law schools took during the pandemic to provide relief to faculty, such as automatic
extensions to the tenure clock for all faculty, place women more at risk than men for harmful
impacts on factors like pay equity. In all, this Essay briefly analyzes how factors such as
limited childcare, remote learning, the greater caretaking needs of students, plus other
pandemic-related effects, have worked to exacerbate previously existing gender and
intersectional gender and race inequities between men and all women in legal academia and
between white men and women of color.