This article @insidehighered w it’s title claiming that COVID is “tanking” women’s productivity as indicated by decreased journal submissions has been popular on my feed.

A few notes, from reading the article, showing this title is really misleading. 1/ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/21/early-journal-submission-data-suggest-covid-19-tanking-womens-research-productivity

First, the hypothesis that academic moms may be more negatively affected is certainly plausible, for the many reasons the article lays out.

But this article contains little actual data to support the claim—The article is mostly an opinion piece with anecdotal confirmations 2/

The main piece of evidence that is being quote tweeted when sharing this article are is anecdotal reports from a couple journal editors 3/

The only quantitative analysis included in the piece actually shows the opposite of what is being claimed by the title: women’s submissions on the whole are actually up, with only sole-author submissions showing a few percentage point decrease. 4/

So is COVID “tanking” women’s productivity? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s really no evidence either way at this point—this is still at the hypothesis stage. Until more meta-research is conducted we don’t know if this is a trend, a blip, or nothing at all. 5/

So let’s stop ( @insidehighered) with the click-bait headlines that misrepresent the data included in the associated article. /end