While evaluating the files of your colleagues for tenure and promotion, please keep in mind that, after March 12, 2020 (the day when it was announced that UNLV would cease many in-person operations), many things changed for faculty. The attached report summarizes some of the impacts that COVID-19 have had of faculty globally. When you are evaluating colleagues on work done since spring semester 2020, please keep in mind the following:

• Student evaluations of teaching, which many believe are already inherently skewed, are additionally problematized by the shift to remote instruction. While student evaluations of teaching should be considered for Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, keep in mind that student perceptions of teaching may be colored by their own difficulties in adjusting to remote instruction.
• The closure and in the 2020-21 school year shift to remote instruction for local schools placed additional childcare burdens on many faculty, with a statistically higher proportion of that burden falling on female faculty.
• Many faculty assumed additional responsibilities in caring for elders and other adults due to the pandemic.
• In many cases, the pandemic limited access to laboratories and other physical locations such as archives necessary for research.
• Granting agencies and publication outlets may have had their work disrupted by the pandemic as well.
• The last four facts, combined with the need to devote greater resources to teaching due to the shift to remote instruction, has led to less time for faculty to devote to research and creative activity.

Whether you are evaluating colleagues in your own unit, at the college/school level, or at the university level, or are an administrator, the system relies on you bringing your expertise and understanding to bear on your evaluation. Standards are developed locally but are applied with comparable rigor across the university. This document does not supersede or provide a substitute for unit standards; it only offers some context for how those standards may be interpreted when evaluating productivity since Spring 2020.

This document provides context to academic leaders, personnel review committees, and external reviewers about the differing COVID-19 impacts and inequities on UNLV faculty during the upcoming tenure and promotion cycle.

Briefly put, COVID-19 has harmed faculty productivity, including academic research, due to increased service commitments, childcare, family care, and teaching adjustments.¹ Studies consistently show that these commitments are already unfairly distributed to women, people of color, and members of other affinity groups. The COVID-19 pandemic has further amplified these existing issues. For example, the switch to online teaching is particularly time-consuming for faculty with heavier teaching loads, larger classes, and more student contact hours.² All faculty during this high-stress environment are more likely to be contacted by students for support, for increased accessibility to answer questions about subjects and for mentorship.³ Research shows that women, faculty of color, LGBTQ, and intersectional faculty are already penalized during teaching evaluations, so additional teaching responsibilities during COVID-19 will likely only increase these penalties.

The closure of schools and the presence of high-risk elderly family members increases child and family care responsibilities, especially for women.⁴ Forbes reports that the pandemic is directly affecting women’s “likelihood of being promoted” due to gender inequities in childcare services.⁵ This same article notes that even with some opening of childcare services, total childcare capacity is down 86% nationwide, which means that “normal” childcare operations are well out of reach for millions of Americans.⁶ Nature reports that male faculty are four times more likely to have a partner engaged in full domestic care than their female colleagues.⁷ Considering that people of color are more likely to know someone who has contracted COVID19 or have contracted the virus themselves, increased care responsibilities are also felt by faculty and staff of color and women faculty and staff of color.⁸ The extra stress of childcare leads to feeling “depressed, anxious, and lonely” for the primary childcare provider.⁹

As one measure of the consequences of these new time constraints for women in academia, people have examined research productivity. One article published by Times Higher Education reports that research submissions are down across the board and that the proportion of women submitting articles has “plummeted.”¹⁰ One research report from Ithaka S+R called the impacts of COVID-19 on research productivity “vast,” and noted disproportionate “impediments” for faculty who are international or work with international students, faculty in gender and sexual minorities, faculty with caregiver status, and faculty in early career stages.¹¹ In another Nature article that surveyed scientists, the authors reported that female scientists experienced “a 5% larger decline in research time” than male scientists. These effects are additive. For example, women with young dependents who require physical laboratories for their research must contend both with limited childcare and the closure of lab spaces during the pandemic. These gaps in academic productivity are predicted to persist potentially for years due to COVID-19’s lingering effects and publishing timelines.¹²

Much of the current research available on the impacts of COVID-19 focuses on differences between men and women's productivity, which is primarily cited here. At the same time, it is important to note that these impacts will be felt by other faculty and staff, especially for faculty and staff whose intersectional identities will lead to a compounding of these burdens including people of color, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and those at the intersections of these identities employed at UNLV.

It is also important to note that, for some, COVID-19 has led to increased time and fewer burdens, thereby increasing productivity. Faculty, for example, who are not childcare providers, have not had family members affected by COVID-19, or do not have physical research needs may have increased flexibility through telecommuting, fewer service requests, and uninterrupted research pipelines. These faculty should not be held up as “ideal” performers but largely as exceptions to the impacts affecting most faculty.¹³