Published research article
Utoft, E. H. (2020). ‘All the single ladies’ as the ideal academic during times of COVID‐19?. Gender, Work & Organization, 27(5), 778-787. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12478
In April 2020, the journal Gender, Work & Organization (GWO) published a call, expressing a wish to document living and working through the pandemic, and articles quickly began to emerge. I was deeply touched by the honest vulnerability of these texts concerning the struggles of working from home as academics while mothering, but these stories of pandemic life had little resonance with my own experience – the key difference being that I was, and still am, single and live alone.
However, it was especially the words of Alessandra Minello and Colleen Flaherty that prompted me to write my own contribution to the GWO call. These writers presented the remote working circumstances of scholars without kids as nearly ideal to safeguard our careers for the future. Minello wrote: ‘Those with fewer care duties are aiming for the stars.’ And citing Elizabeth Hannon (deputy editor of the British Journal of Philosophy of Science), Flaherty wrote: ‘“Unburdened” [i.e., child-free] academics could continue to write and “stockpile” papers to submit later.’ Crucially, such assumptions neglect two things: 1. Global crisis and disaster, such as a pandemic, can never be the ideal circumstances to be professionally productive, and 2. In a global crisis, productivity should not be our main concern. So, to challenge these views, I started writing.
Source: https://twitter.com/robin__craig/status/1242824048905728000?s=20&t=yYrhfNMV3J9Fh9F-tVQgQA
The story that wasn’t being told
On January 31st 2020, I handed in my PhD dissertation and in early April, a few weeks into the pandemic, I received the committee’s assessment. The dissertation was approved for defense, providing that I completed some revisions. Given the complexity of these revisions, and the still unfamiliar situation of working remotely, what happened was that I became completely consumed by my work. In fact, I was working to the point of burnout – because what else was there to do in lockdown, when you live alone?
However, this story was not being told anywhere. All I was reading was that the struggles of ‘women’ in the pandemic concerned reductions in productivity due to childcare needs, which really made me wonder:
Will anyone accept my struggle as legitimate when it strays from this normative perception of what the struggles of ‘women’ in their work lives concern?
Scholars, including Catherine Rottenberg, have argued that the concept of work/life balance in actuality often means work/family balance for working mothers specifically. When ‘life’ implicitly equals ‘childcare’, it becomes clear that ‘balance’ discourses conflate women with mothers, often in the context of unequal heterosexual relationships, although obviously motherhood and coupledom do not represent the lived realities of all women. This made me ask a second question, namely, whether single, childfree women are then entitled to balance at all? Given the added work pressure I faced doing the revisions, I certainly found it hard to justify time for rest.
Toxic productivity
Because the neoliberal university never rests. The ever-increasing productivity demands put on scholars (incl., teaching and publishing) and the guilt of always falling short persisted even as Covid-19 disrupted our lives. The belief that our work could simply be ‘moved online’ prevailed, but in practice there was nothing simple about it.
Neoliberalism as a cultural logic extending beyond academia was furthermore evident in the flood of online content that, early on, encouraged us to learn to speak new languages, knit or bake sourdough bread. Knitting or baking may be brilliant ways of caring for your mental health during lockdown, however, neoliberalism dictates that if we did not do these things, we had wasted an opportunity to self-optimize and our ‘value’ would stagnate as a result. Evidently, in the pandemic, in which working mothers felt they were professionally under-performing and single people were significantly over-working themselves, the neoliberal cooptation of leisure activities is outright harmful.
Source: https://www.vogue.com/article/i-dont-need-a-hobby
As Mie Plotnikof and I have argued in a recent GWO article, the optional ‘fun’ Zoom backgrounds work ideally to conceal how, in the pandemic, most people struggle. When we are disconnected, and our struggles happen privately in our homes, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that the grass is greener for others, as Minello and Flaherty did. And that is what toxicity does: It is exacerbated by isolation and exacerbates isolation, mutual comparison, envy and shame. Therefore, the remedy is connectivity and care.
Personally, I found great comfort in an article by Aisha S. Ahmad, in which she argued that the focus on maintaining scholarly productivity constitutes blatant denial of the fact that the pandemic will profoundly alter the world. What we should be worrying about, as it is ongoing, then, is surviving while coming to terms with this change in order ‘to reimagine ourselves in this new reality.’
In my own case, I gradually learned that in lockdown much more active reaching out to colleagues and supervisors was needed to get the academic sparring I needed, which also enabled me to complete the revisions of my dissertation. And after nearly two months of being on my own while working from home, I overcame my fear of transmitting Covid-19 to my parents and went to stay with them for a while, finally acknowledging that I was lonely. So overall, the tough period that I wrote about was short and I got through it. Since then, in subsequent lockdowns, I have had ample time to get the hang of remote working while also sustaining my mental health.
The telling of untold stories
In my article, I never intended to compare the relative severity of different people’s struggles. I wished to nuance the beliefs about single people’s pandemic experiences that seemed to prevail, exactly because our stories were not being told. Given the feedback I have received, my story resonated with readers. Since singlehood is a relatively new area of study, it cannot be overstated what it means for those overlooked to read our life situation being taken seriously in scholarship, treated as worthy of in-depth theoretical reflection – no snide remarks about ‘spinsters’ or ‘cat ladies.’ The readers appreciated that I tried to unfold why working from home while living alone was not the ideal working conditions that many seemed to believe. And that I argued that single people’s concerns and struggles in the pandemic were valid and worthy of attention too.
About the author
Dr Ea Høg Utoft is a postdoc from Aarhus University (DK), but soon-to-be assistant professor of gender and diversity at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, at Radboud University (NL). Ea has a background in languages, organisations and Human Resource Management. Her research covers systemic inequalities in knowledge-intensive organisations including universities, and gender dynamics in knowledge-production.
Twitter: @eautoft
LinkedIn: Ea Høg Utoft
Research Gate: Ea Høg Utoft
