Academic Motherhood in Mathematics Education during COVID-19: Breaking the Silence and Shifting the Discourse

Abstract

Despite decades of social change and institutional reform, the academic gender gap continues to exist in many countries around the world and disproportionately affects women with children. Early indicators suggest that COVID-19 will widen this gap and exacerbate issues academic mothers face. In this essay we seek to raise awareness to the challenges and tensions academic mothers in mathematics education face both outside of and during a pandemic. We use existing literature on academic motherhood to make sense of our lived experiences, working to reframe pieces that are so often viewed as deficits to assets for our work in mathematics education. We hope that this will bring visibility to the invisible ways our identities as mothers inform our work as mathematics teacher educators and researchers. We conclude this essay with a call for the university-based mathematics education community to break the silence around the inequities associated with academic motherhood in our field and to shift the discourse from deficits of academic mothers to asset orientated views.