Gender

One such interpreter is Debora L. Spar, the dean of Harvard Business School Online, who writes at the intersection of tech and gender. In her new book, “Work Mate Marry Love,” she considers an emerging wave of innovations that she believes could upend how we experience relationships, reproduction, gender expression and death. “We will fall in love with nonhuman beings,” Spar predicts in the book’s opening pages, “and find ways to extend our human lives into something that begins to approximate forever.” Spar argues that new technologies spark shifts in the most intimate of human affairs, often in unexpected ways. She casts this as a causal relationship, one imbued with a sense of inevitability. The book’s subtitle, “How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny,” gives the machines the agency.

“The pandemic has involved much more than simply forcing scientists to work from home,” says Kyle Myers, a co-author of the survey of U.S. and European scientists and an economist at Harvard Business School. “It has forced them to manage childcare in new ways, prevented serendipitous conversations in the office hallways, and limited their ability to attend conferences or work at field sites or access certain equipment.”

Not all parents can access that leave — for instance, large companies are exempt. But even when flexible arrangements are available, Colleen Ammerman of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, said working moms often pay a price. “They’re seen as lower performing even though their actual output and productivity is just as high or higher,” she said. Ammerman said those kind of biases, along with stereotypes that link women to caregiving, will add to the pressures of the pandemic and potentially lead many women to cut back or give up work altogether. There’s already research that shows female academics have submitted fewer articles to academic journals because they’re spending more time caring for children.