Jessica Leveto Mentioned in Nature Article

Jessica Leveto

Jess Leveto, a sociologist in the College of Education, Health and Human, was quoted in an article by Nature.com titled "Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?"

Leveto says that she "hears [workplace] grievances — particularly from academic mothers — in the United States."

“For a long time, people invested in the ideal-worker mentality of ‘I’m going to produce as much as I can and show them I’m a good employee but the care wasn’t reciprocated,” she says.

Leveto has surveyed roughly 1,000 US university faculty members over the past two years to monitor how the pandemic affected career outlooks, but has not yet published the results. In 2021, she says, respondents were angry and frustrated because they felt universities were too eager to put them back into classrooms amid pandemic safety concerns.

Leveto started a Facebook group called PhD Mamas in 2015 as a support system for academic mothers. It had fewer than 1,500 members, for years. Now, it has roughly 12,000 — and a dedicated subgroup of more than 300 mothers exploring how to leave academia. Mothers in academia have had a stressful time: bogged down by childcare demands during the pandemic, many women’s careers suffered much more than men’s (M. I. Cardell et al. Ann. Am. Thorac. Soc. 17, 1366–1370; 2020).

--Nature.com