Women academics crafting slow and sustainable careers: lessons from a pandemic

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic was a time when most women, including academics, faced increased challenges. Some women academics, however, told us that they had positive experiences during lockdown. This article explores how identity work and job crafting strategies were adopted by these women to enable them to flourish and build more sustainable careers. Design/methodology/approach This article draws on data from semi-structured interviews with twenty-three women academics in the United Kingdom. A deductive content analysis was undertaken. Findings These women engaged in both identity work and job crafting, transforming their self-meanings and working lives, in line with the principles of slow academia. This was enabled by changes in the spaces and temporalities of work afforded by the pandemic, which provided a conducive context for these women to use individual agency and achieve positive outcomes. We critically discuss the positionalities and privileges that made this possible. Originality/value This article provides empirical evidence of how adopting principles of slow academia led to positive experiences for some women academics during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also makes a theoretical contribution by integrating the concepts of identity work and job crafting to explore how these women achieved a sense of flourishing. While identity researchers have utilized these separately, we theorize how these two frameworks converge, including within the specific research setting, and explore lessons that might be learned from this pandemic experience to improve gender parity and career sustainability in Higher Education.