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• Published: 16 June 2020

COVID-19 impact on research, lessons learned from COVID-19 research, implications for pediatric research

• Debra L. Weiner 1 , 2 ,
• Vivek Balasubramaniam 3 ,
• Shetal I. Shah 4 &
• Joyce R. Javier 5 , 6

on behalf of the Pediatric Policy Council

Pediatric Research volume  88 ,  pages 148–150 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented research worldwide. The impact on research in progress at the time of the pandemic, the importance and challenges of real-time pandemic research, and the importance of a pediatrician-scientist workforce are all highlighted by this epic pandemic. As we navigate through and beyond this pandemic, which will have a long-lasting impact on our world, including research and the biomedical research enterprise, it is important to recognize and address opportunities and strategies for, and challenges of research and strengthening the pediatrician-scientist workforce.

The first cases of what is now recognized as SARS-CoV-2 infection, termed COVID-19, were reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 as cases of fatal pneumonia. By February 26, 2020, COVID-19 had been reported on all continents except Antarctica. As of May 4, 2020, 3.53 million cases and 248,169 deaths have been reported from 210 countries. 1

Impact of COVID-19 on ongoing research

The impact on research in progress prior to COVID-19 was rapid, dramatic, and no doubt will be long term. The pandemic curtailed most academic, industry, and government basic science and clinical research, or redirected research to COVID-19. Most clinical trials, except those testing life-saving therapies, have been paused, and most continuing trials are now closed to new enrollment. Ongoing clinical trials have been modified to enable home administration of treatment and virtual monitoring to minimize participant risk of COVID-19 infection, and to avoid diverting healthcare resources from pandemic response. In addition to short- and long-term patient impact, these research disruptions threaten the careers of physician-scientists, many of whom have had to shift efforts from research to patient care. To protect research in progress, as well as physician-scientist careers and the research workforce, ongoing support is critical. NIH ( https://grants.nih.gov/policy/natural-disasters/corona-virus.htm ), PCORI ( https://www.pcori.org/funding-opportunities/applicant-and-awardee-faqs-related-covid-19 ), and other funders acted swiftly to provide guidance on proposal submission and award management, and implement allowances that enable grant personnel to be paid and time lines to be relaxed. Research institutions have also implemented strategies to mitigate the long-term impact of research disruptions. Support throughout and beyond the pandemic to retain currently well-trained research personnel and research support teams, and to accommodate loss of research assets, including laboratory supplies and study participants, will be required to complete disrupted research and ultimately enable new research.

In the long term, it is likely that the pandemic will force reallocation of research dollars at the expense of research areas funded prior to the pandemic. It will be more important than ever for the pediatric research community to engage in discussion and decisions regarding prioritization of funding goals for dedicated pediatric research and meaningful inclusion of children in studies. The recently released 2020 National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) strategic plan that engaged stakeholders, including scientists and patients, to shape the goals of the Institute, will require modification to best chart a path toward restoring normalcy within pediatric science.

COVID-19 research

This global pandemic once again highlights the importance of research, stable research infrastructure, and funding for public health emergency (PHE)/disaster preparedness, response, and resiliency. The stakes in this worldwide pandemic have never been higher as lives are lost, economies falter, and life has radically changed. Ultimate COVID-19 mitigation and crisis resolution is dependent on high-quality research aligned with top priority societal goals that yields trustworthy data and actionable information. While the highest priority goals are treatment and prevention, biomedical research also provides data critical to manage and restore economic and social welfare.

Scientific and technological knowledge and resources have never been greater and have been leveraged globally to perform COVID-19 research at warp speed. The number of studies related to COVID-19 increases daily, the scope and magnitude of engagement is stunning, and the extent of global collaboration unprecedented. On January 5, 2020, just weeks after the first cases of illness were reported, the genetic sequence, which identified the pathogen as a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was released, providing information essential for identifying and developing treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics. As of May 3, 2020 1133 COVID-19 studies, including 148 related to hydroxychloroquine, 13 to remdesivir, 50 to vaccines, and 100 to diagnostic testing, were registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, and 980 different studies on the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (WHO ICTRP), made possible, at least in part, by use of data libraries to inform development of antivirals, immunomodulators, antibody-based biologics, and vaccines. On April 7, 2020, the FDA launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program (CTAP) ( https://www.fda.gov/drugs/coronavirus-covid-19-drugs/coronavirus-treatment-acceleration-program-ctap ). On April 17, 2020, NIH announced a partnership with industry to expedite vaccine development ( https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launch-public-private-partnership-speed-covid-19-vaccine-treatment-options ). As of May 1, 2020, remdesivir (Gilead), granted FDA emergency use authorization, is the only approved therapeutic for COVID-19. 2

The pandemic has intensified research challenges. In a rush for data already thousands of manuscripts, news reports, and blogs have been published, but to date, there is limited scientifically robust data. Some studies do not meet published clinical trial standards, which now include FDA’s COVID-19-specific standards, 3 , 4 , 5 and/or are published without peer review. Misinformation from studies diverts resources from development and testing of more promising therapeutic candidates and has endangered lives. Ibuprofen, initially reported as unsafe for patients with COVID-19, resulted in a shortage of acetaminophen, endangering individuals for whom ibuprofen is contraindicated. Hydroxychloroquine initially reported as potentially effective for treatment of COVID-19 resulted in shortages for patients with autoimmune diseases. Remdesivir, in rigorous trials, showed decrease in duration of COVID-19, with greater effect given early. 6 Given the limited availability and safety data, the use outside clinical trials is currently approved only for severe disease. Vaccines typically take 10–15 years to develop. As of May 3, 2020, of nearly 100 vaccines in development, 8 are in trial. Several vaccines are projected to have emergency approval within 12–18 months, possibly as early as the end of the year, 7 still an eternity for this pandemic, yet too soon for long-term effectiveness and safety data. Antibody testing, necessary for diagnosis, therapeutics, and vaccine testing, has presented some of the greatest research challenges, including validation, timing, availability and prioritization of testing, interpretation of test results, and appropriate patient and societal actions based on results. 8 Relaxing physical distancing without data regarding test validity, duration, and strength of immunity to different strains of COVID-19 could have catastrophic results. Understanding population differences and disparities, which have been further exposed during this pandemic, is critical for response and long-term pandemic recovery. The “Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act” calls for the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and other HHS (United States Department of Health & Human Services) agencies to publicly release racial and demographic information ( https://bass.house.gov/sites/bass.house.gov/files/Equitable%20Data%20Collection%20and%20Dislosure%20on%20COVID19%20Act_FINAL.pdf )

Trusted sources of up-to-date, easily accessible information must be identified (e.g., WHO https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/global-research-on-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov , CDC https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/hcp/index.html , and for children AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) https://www.aappublications.org/cc/covid-19 ) and should comment on quality of data and provide strategies and crisis standards to guide clinical practice.

Long-term, lessons learned from research during this pandemic could benefit the research enterprise worldwide beyond the pandemic and during other PHE/disasters with strategies for balancing multiple novel approaches and high-quality, time-efficient, cost-effective research. This challenge, at least in part, can be met by appropriate study design, collaboration, patient registries, automated data collection, artificial intelligence, data sharing, and ongoing consideration of appropriate regulatory approval processes. In addition, research to develop and evaluate innovative strategies and technologies to improve access to care, management of health and disease, and quality, safety, and cost effectiveness of care could revolutionize healthcare and healthcare systems. During PHE/disasters, crisis standards for research should be considered along with ongoing and just-in-time PHE/disaster training for researchers willing to share information that could be leveraged at time of crisis. A dedicated funded core workforce of PHE/disaster researchers and funded infrastructure should be considered, potentially as a consortium of networks, that includes physician-scientists, basic scientists, social scientists, mental health providers, global health experts, epidemiologists, public health experts, engineers, information technology experts, economists and educators to strategize, consult, review, monitor, interpret studies, guide appropriate clinical use of data, and inform decisions regarding effective use of resources for PHE/disaster research.

Differences between adult and pediatric COVID-19, the need for pediatric research

As reported by the CDC, from February 12 to April 2, 2020, of 149,760 cases of confirmed COVID-19 in the United States, 2572 (1.7%) were children aged <18 years, similar to published rates in China. 9 Severe illness has been rare. Of 749 children for whom hospitalization data is available, 147 (20%) required hospitalization (5.7% of total children), and 15 of 147 required ICU care (2.0%, 0.58% of total). Of the 95 children aged <1 year, 59 (62%) were hospitalized, and 5 (5.3%) required ICU admission. Among children there were three deaths. Despite children being relatively spared by COVID-19, spread of disease by children, and consequences for their health and pediatric healthcare are potentially profound with immediate and long-term impact on all of society.

We have long been aware of the importance and value of pediatric research on children, and society. COVID-19 is no exception and highlights the imperative need for a pediatrician-scientist workforce. Understanding differences in epidemiology, susceptibility, manifestations, and treatment of COVID-19 in children can provide insights into this pathogen, pathogen–host interactions, pathophysiology, and host response for the entire population. Pediatric clinical registries of COVID-infected, COVID-exposed children can provide data and specimens for immediate and long-term research. Of the 1133 COVID-19 studies on ClinicalTrials.gov, 202 include children aged ≤17 years. Sixty-one of the 681 interventional trials include children. With less diagnostic testing and less pediatric research, we not only endanger children, but also adults by not identifying infected children and limiting spread by children.

Pediatric considerations and challenges related to treatment and vaccine research for COVID-19 include appropriate dosing, pediatric formulation, and pediatric specific short- and long-term effectiveness and safety. Typically, initial clinical trials exclude children until safety has been established in adults. But with time of the essence, deferring pediatric research risks the health of children, particularly those with special needs. Considerations specific to pregnant women, fetuses, and neonates must also be addressed. Childhood mental health in this demographic, already struggling with a mental health pandemic prior to COVID-19, is now further challenged by social disruption, food and housing insecurity, loss of loved ones, isolation from friends and family, and exposure to an infodemic of pandemic-related information. Interestingly, at present mental health visits along with all visits to pediatric emergency departments across the United States are dramatically decreased. Understanding factors that mitigate and worsen psychiatric symptoms should be a focus of research, and ideally will result in strategies for prevention and management in the long term, including beyond this pandemic. Social well-being of children must also be studied. Experts note that the pandemic is a perfect storm for child maltreatment given that vulnerable families are now socially isolated, facing unemployment, and stressed, and that children are not under the watch of mandated reporters in schools, daycare, and primary care. 10 Many states have observed a decrease in child abuse reports and an increase in severity of emergency department abuse cases. In the short term and long term, it will be important to study the impact of access to care, missed care, and disrupted education during COVID-19 on physical and cognitive development.

Training and supporting pediatrician-scientists, such as through NIH physician-scientist research training and career development programs ( https://researchtraining.nih.gov/infographics/physician-scientist ) at all stages of career, as well as fostering research for fellows, residents, and medical students willing to dedicate their research career to, or at least understand implications of their research for, PHE/disasters is important for having an ongoing, as well as a just-in-time surge pediatric-focused PHE/disaster workforce. In addition to including pediatric experts in collaborations and consortiums with broader population focus, consideration should be given to pediatric-focused multi-institutional, academic, industry, and/or government consortiums with infrastructure and ongoing funding for virtual training programs, research teams, and multidisciplinary oversight.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on research and research in response to the pandemic once again highlights the importance of research, challenges of research particularly during PHE/disasters, and opportunities and resources for making research more efficient and cost effective. New paradigms and models for research will hopefully emerge from this pandemic. The importance of building sustained PHE/disaster research infrastructure and a research workforce that includes training and funding for pediatrician-scientists and integrates the pediatrician research workforce into high-quality research across demographics, supports the pediatrician-scientist workforce and pipeline, and benefits society.

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Department of Pediatrics, Division of Emergency Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Debra L. Weiner

Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Department of Pediatrics, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA

Vivek Balasubramaniam

Department of Pediatrics and Division of Neonatology, Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center, New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY, USA

Shetal I. Shah

Division of General Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Joyce R. Javier

Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

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All authors made substantial contributions to conception and design, data acquisition and interpretation, drafting the manuscript, and providing critical revisions. All authors approve this final version of the manuscript.

Pediatric Policy Council

Scott C. Denne, MD, Chair, Pediatric Policy Council; Mona Patel, MD, Representative to the PPC from the Academic Pediatric Association; Jean L. Raphael, MD, MPH, Representative to the PPC from the Academic Pediatric Association; Jonathan Davis, MD, Representative to the PPC from the American Pediatric Society; DeWayne Pursley, MD, MPH, Representative to the PPC from the American Pediatric Society; Tina Cheng, MD, MPH, Representative to the PPC from the Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs; Michael Artman, MD, Representative to the PPC from the Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs; Shetal Shah, MD, Representative to the PPC from the Society for Pediatric Research; Joyce Javier, MD, MPH, MS, Representative to the PPC from the Society for Pediatric Research.

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Correspondence to Debra L. Weiner .

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Weiner, D.L., Balasubramaniam, V., Shah, S.I. et al. COVID-19 impact on research, lessons learned from COVID-19 research, implications for pediatric research. Pediatr Res 88 , 148–150 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-1006-3

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The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2021)

Chapter: 8 major findings and research questions, 8 major findings and research questions, introduction.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in late 2019, created unprecedented global disruption and infused a significant level of uncertainty into the lives of individuals, both personally and professionally, around the world throughout 2020. The significant effect on vulnerable populations, such as essential workers and the elderly, is well documented, as is the devastating effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on the economy, particularly brick-and-mortar retail and hospitality and food services. Concurrently, the deaths of unarmed Black people at the hands of law enforcement officers created a heightened awareness of the persistence of structural injustices in U.S. society.

Against the backdrop of this public health crisis, economic upheaval, and amplified social consciousness, an ad hoc committee was appointed to review the potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in academic science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) during 2020. The committee’s work built on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Promising Practices for Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine: Opening Doors (the Promising Practices report), which presents evidence-based recommendations to address the well-established structural barriers that impede the advancement of women in STEMM. However, the committee recognized that none of the actions identified in the Promising Practices report were conceived within the context of a pandemic, an economic downturn, or the emergence of national protests against structural racism. The representation and vitality of academic women in STEMM had already warranted national attention prior to these events, and the COVID-19

pandemic appeared to represent an additional risk to the fragile progress that women had made in some STEMM disciplines. Furthermore, the future will almost certainly hold additional, unforeseen disruptions, which underscores the importance of the committee’s work.

In times of stress, there is a risk that the divide will deepen between those who already have advantages and those who do not. In academia, senior and tenured academics are more likely to have an established reputation, a stable salary commitment, and power within the academic system. They are more likely, before the COVID-19 pandemic began, to have established professional networks, generated data that can be used to write papers, and achieved financial and job security. While those who have these advantages may benefit from a level of stability relative to others during stressful times, those who were previously systemically disadvantaged are more likely to experience additional strain and instability.

As this report has documented, during 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic had overall negative effects on women in academic STEMM in areas such productivity, boundary setting and boundary control, networking and community building, burnout rates, and mental well-being. The excessive expectations of caregiving that often fall on the shoulders of women cut across career timeline and rank (e.g., graduate student, postdoctoral scholar, non-tenure-track and other contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty), institution type, and scientific discipline. Although there have been opportunities for innovation and some potential shifts in expectations, increased caregiving demands associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, such as remote working, school closures, and childcare and eldercare, had disproportionately negative outcomes for women.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in STEMM during 2020 are understood better through an intentionally intersectional lens. Productivity, career, boundary setting, mental well-being, and health are all influenced by the ways in which social identities are defined and cultivated within social and power structures. Race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, academic career stage, appointment type, institution type, age, and disability status, among many other factors, can amplify or diminish the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for a given person. For example, non-cisgender women may be forced to return to home environments where their gender identity is not accepted, increasing their stress and isolation, and decreasing their well-being. Women of Color had a higher likelihood of facing a COVID-19–related death in their family compared with their white, non-Hispanic colleagues. The full extent of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for women of various social identities was not fully understood at the end of 2020.

Considering the relative paucity of women in many STEMM fields prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, women are more likely to experience academic isolation, including limited access to mentors, sponsors, and role models that share gender, racial, or ethnic identities. Combining this reality with the physical isolation stipulated by public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic,

women in STEMM were subject to increasing isolation within their fields, networks, and communities. Explicit attention to the early indicators of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected women in academic STEMM careers during 2020, as well as attention to crisis responses throughout history, may provide opportunities to mitigate some of the long-term effects and potentially develop a more resilient and equitable academic STEMM system.

MAJOR FINDINGS

Given the ongoing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not possible to fully understand the entirety of the short- or long-term implications of this global disruption on the careers of women in academic STEMM. Having gathered preliminary data and evidence available in 2020, the committee found that significant changes to women’s work-life boundaries and divisions of labor, careers, productivity, advancement, mentoring and networking relationships, and mental health and well-being have been observed. The following findings represent those aspects that the committee agreed have been substantiated by the preliminary data, evidence, and information gathered by the end of 2020. They are presented either as Established Research and Experiences from Previous Events or Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic during 2020 that parallel the topics as presented in the report.

Established Research and Experiences from Previous Events

___________________

1 This finding is primarily based on research on cisgender women and men.

Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic during 2020

Research questions.

While this report compiled much of the research, data, and evidence available in 2020 on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, future research is still needed to understand all the potential effects, especially any long-term implications. The research questions represent areas the committee identified for future research, rather than specific recommendations. They are presented in six categories that parallel the chapters of the report: Cross-Cutting Themes; Academic Productivity and Institutional Responses; Work-Life Boundaries and Gendered Divisions of Labor; Collaboration, Networking, and Professional Societies; Academic Leadership and Decision-Making; and Mental Health and Well-being. The committee hopes the report will be used as a basis for continued understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in its entirety and as a reference for mitigating impacts of future disruptions that affect women in academic STEMM. The committee also hopes that these research questions may enable academic STEMM to emerge from the pandemic era a stronger, more equitable place for women. Therefore, the committee identifies two types of research questions in each category; listed first are those questions aimed at understanding the impacts of the disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by those questions exploring the opportunities to help support the full participation of women in the future.

Cross-Cutting Themes

• What are the short- and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the career trajectories, job stability, and leadership roles of women, particularly of Black women and other Women of Color? How do these effects vary across institutional characteristics, 2 discipline, and career stage?

2 Institutional characteristics include different institutional types (e.g., research university, liberal arts college, community college), locales (e.g., urban, rural), missions (e.g., Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Asian American/Native American/Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities), and levels of resources.

• How did the confluence of structural racism, economic hardships, and environmental disruptions affect Women of Color during the COVID-19 pandemic? Specifically, how did the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black citizens impact Black women academics’ safety, ability to be productive, and mental health?
• How has the inclusion of women in leadership and other roles in the academy influenced the ability of institutions to respond to the confluence of major social crises during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How can institutions build on the involvement women had across STEMM disciplines during the COVID-19 pandemic to increase the participation of women in STEMM and/or elevate and support women in their current STEMM-related positions?
• How can institutions adapt, leverage, and learn from approaches developed during 2020 to attend to challenges experienced by Women of Color in STEMM in the future?

Academic Productivity and Institutional Responses

• How did the institutional responses (e.g., policies, practices) that were outlined in the Major Findings impact women faculty across institutional characteristics and disciplines?
• What are the short- and long-term effects of faculty evaluation practices and extension policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic on the productivity and career trajectories of members of the academic STEMM workforce by gender?
• What adaptations did women use during the transition to online and hybrid teaching modes? How did these techniques and adaptations vary as a function of career stage and institutional characteristics?
• What are examples of institutional changes implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that have the potential to reduce systemic barriers to participation and advancement that have historically been faced by academic women in STEMM, specifically Women of Color and other marginalized women in STEMM? How might positive institutional responses be leveraged to create a more resilient and responsive higher education ecosystem?
• How can or should funding arrangements be altered (e.g., changes in funding for research and/or mentorship programs) to support new ways of interaction for women in STEMM during times of disruption, such as the COVID-19 pandemic?

Work-Life Boundaries and Gendered Divisions of Labor

• How do different social identities (e.g., racial; socioeconomic status; culturally, ethnically, sexually, or gender diverse; immigration status; parents of young children and other caregivers; women without partners) influence the management of work-nonwork boundaries? How did this change during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How have COVID-19 pandemic-related disruptions affected progress toward reducing the gender gap in academic STEMM labor-force participation? How does this differ for Women of Color or women with caregiving responsibilities?
• How can institutions account for the unique challenges of women faculty with parenthood and caregiving responsibilities when developing effective and equitable policies, practices, or programs?
• How might insights gained about work-life boundaries during the COVID-19 pandemic inform how institutions develop and implement supportive resources (e.g., reductions in workload, on-site childcare, flexible working options)?

Collaboration, Networking, and Professional Societies

• What were the short- and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic-prompted switch from in-person conferences to virtual conferences on conference culture and climate, especially for women in STEMM?
• How will the increase in virtual conferences specifically affect women’s advancement and career trajectories? How will it affect women’s collaborations?
• How has the shift away from attending conferences and in-person networking changed longer-term mentoring and sponsoring relationships, particularly in terms of gender dynamics?
• How can institutions maximize the benefits of digitization and the increased use of technology observed during the COVID-19 pandemic to continue supporting women, especially marginalized women, by increasing accessibility, collaborations, mentorship, and learning?
• How can organizations that support, host, or facilitate online and virtual conferences and networking events (1) ensure open and fair access to participants who face different funding and time constraints; (2) foster virtual connections among peers, mentors, and sponsors; and (3) maintain an inclusive environment to scientists of all backgrounds?
• What policies, practices, or programs can be developed to help women in STEMM maintain a sense of support, structure, and stability during and after periods of disruption?

Academic Leadership and Decision-Making

• What specific interventions did colleges and universities initiate or prioritize to ensure that women were included in decision-making processes during responses to the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How effective were colleges and universities that prioritized equity-minded leadership, shared leadership, and crisis leadership styles at mitigating emerging and potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in their communities?
• What specific aspects of different leadership models translated to more effective strategies to advance women in STEMM, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How can examples of intentional inclusion of women in decision-making processes during the COVID-19 pandemic be leveraged to develop the engagement of women as leaders at all levels of academic institutions?
• What are potential “top-down” structural changes in academia that can be implemented to mitigate the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic or other disruptions?
• How can academic leadership, at all levels, more effectively support the mental health needs of women in STEMM?

Mental Health and Well-being

• What is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional responses on the mental health and well-being of members of the academic STEMM workforce as a function of gender, race, and career stage?
• How are tools and diagnostic tests to measure aspects of wellbeing, including burnout and insomnia, used in academic settings? How does this change during times of increased stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How might insights gained about mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic be used to inform preparedness for future disruptions?
• How can programs that focus on changes in biomarkers of stress and mood dysregulation, such as levels of sleep, activity, and texting patterns, be developed and implemented to better engage women in addressing their mental health?
• What are effective interventions to address the health of women academics in STEMM that specifically account for the effects of stress on women? What are effective interventions to mitigate the excessive levels of stress for Women of Color?

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The spring of 2020 marked a change in how almost everyone conducted their personal and professional lives, both within science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) and beyond. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global scientific conferences and individual laboratories and required people to find space in their homes from which to work. It blurred the boundaries between work and non-work, infusing ambiguity into everyday activities. While adaptations that allowed people to connect became more common, the evidence available at the end of 2020 suggests that the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic endangered the engagement, experience, and retention of women in academic STEMM, and may roll back some of the achievement gains made by women in the academy to date.

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identifies, names, and documents how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the careers of women in academic STEMM during the initial 9-month period since March 2020 and considers how these disruptions - both positive and negative - might shape future progress for women. This publication builds on the 2020 report Promising Practices for Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nuanced ways these disruptions have manifested. The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will inform the academic community as it emerges from the pandemic to mitigate any long-term negative consequences for the continued advancement of women in the academic STEMM workforce and build on the adaptations and opportunities that have emerged.

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Speed and resilience: Five priorities for the next five months

Speed has been a fundamental characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic—the virus hit fast, sending much of the world into lockdown just months after it was first detected. Businesses reacted rapidly, reorganizing supply chains , adopting remote-work models, and speeding up decision making with surprising velocity. Vaccines were created with unprecedented swiftness. And as with prior crises, the organizations that acted quickly to counter the COVID-19 downturn dealt with the disruption better than the organizations that reacted more slowly.

The need for sustainable speed

Speed is also likely to be a central feature of what happens next—with one important difference. Over the past year, adrenaline unlocked speed. In the near future, speed will need to arrive by design.

For companies to achieve long-term resilience , it is imperative for them to ensure that the speed they successfully unlocked during the pandemic remains sustainable in the future . To do this, organizations will need to take into account not only potential strains on capacity but also the mental health  of their workforce and the burnout often experienced by employees . To prepare, businesses need to ask and answer the following five questions.

1. What kind of demand shift should we expect, and how do we get ready for it?

Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies expect to see meaningful shifts in the shape of future demand. This will affect their commercial model.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many households prioritized buying goods (especially basic products such as groceries) over services (such as restaurants and hair salons, many of which were closed anyway). As a result, pent-up demand could lead to a spike in spending on services as and when normalcy returns. What is still unclear is which services will return and in what form. For example, consumers have been spending more on home-based products, such as streaming and meal delivery. Will those preferences stick, or will consumers revert to their prepandemic habits? Or something in between? How quickly will travel and related services recover, and what will consumers expect from these experiences?

The consumer demand recovery and lasting effects of COVID 19 on prospects for consumer demand found that online grocery shopping, virtual healthcare visits, and home nesting were likely to stick. On the other hand, people would likely return to prepandemic patterns, or close to them, when it came to leisure air travel, live entertainment, and education. As for those consumer-products companies and retailers whose sales have risen during the pandemic, they will need to keep up with changing consumer demand to avoid a slump. Approaches to doing this vary but include promotions, more detailed segmentation, better customer experiences, and enhanced product availability.

During the pandemic, many companies have been able to develop a deeper understanding of customer behavior. Real-time and detailed consumer segmentation  can replace broad-brush, less accurate survey-based understanding. These data can not only be used to make better, more specific longer-term bets on how demand for a particular product or service may evolve but can also open up a world of new possibilities on how businesses can adapt at the speed of culture. Marketing campaigns will likely need to be conceived, launched, and adjusted much faster than was the norm even a couple of years ago.

Many B2B companies value the traditional sales model, and that new-relationship formation will continue to occur in person. There is research that supports the view that developing trust with B2B customers is tougher in entirely remote environments. However, there is also compelling evidence that B2B buyers prefer the convenience of online , or even automated sales, once trust has been established. An effective way to continue the relationship, then, is to ensure access to convenient online sales channels to drive speed and convenience for a new generation of B2B purchasers.

2. How do we incorporate new ways of working to enhance productivity and health?

Over the past year, organizations have become well versed in the basics of ensuring a safe working environment. More recently, however, companies have reported that some of their workers appear to be more willing to participate in higher-risk activities simply because they are tired of living with virus restrictions . This will require a different type of intervention and messaging, especially because newer COVID-19 variants pose a high risk and may be transmitted in ways that are not yet fully understood. Employers have a unique societal role  to play in vaccination; they are important voices  and can help reduce the friction associated with getting the vaccine.

Self-reported data from a wide range of organizations point to individual and team productivity being higher than before the onset of the pandemic, but not uniformly so. According to a McKinsey survey, productivity is up for about half of all workers, with the other half reporting no change or lower productivity. The same survey suggested that, while the inability to disconnect is a real concern, increased productivity is correlated to a willingness to change how people work. For instance, 67 percent of the organizations that reported higher productivity also reported a significant increase in work getting done through multiple, quick meetings , typically lasting less than 15 minutes or resolved through an exchange of text messages. Evidence is also emerging that appears to show a correlation between an employee’s sense of belonging and higher productivity. An unpublished McKinsey survey of employees found that companies that managed to build inclusiveness into the remote-work arrangements that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly more likely to see increased productivity.

The shift to virtual work has also resulted in a wealth of new data about how work is done. Meetings are more likely to take place via videoconferencing. Communication is more likely to occur through electronic channels or remote-meeting applications. Such data, interpreted correctly, can pinpoint opportunities for skill building at a higher frequency and specificity. For example, the chief human-resources office of a leading consumer-products company is rewriting her job description because she believes the role will need to evolve  into one in which data science and interpretation take on greater prominence. This kind of role adaptation, as well as the ability to construct, schedule, and deliver remote courses with far greater ease and efficiency than in-person training, means that the promise of specific, real-time upskilling is closer than before.

In some cases, companies are using this moment  to strengthen their speed muscles, while also increasing the emphasis on building personal connections and reducing fatigue . Work can and should look different to create competitive advantage in performance and health.

Employers have a unique societal role to play in vaccination; they are important voices and can help reduce the friction associated with getting the vaccine.

3. How do we get the most value out of office real estate?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many workers abruptly began to work from home. At first, the thinking was that productivity and job satisfaction would plummet. In fact, while some people struggled with the transition, for others, the new arrangement showed how much flexibility one can have in how—and where—to work. As a result, the workplace will never be the same.

At the same time, however, the level of remote-work adoption that has occurred in the context of COVID-19 is unlikely to persist into the future. We believe that the future for knowledge-based companies will be hybrid . Bringing people together in person can enhance collaboration, ensure alignment, and foster community. Companies will need to decide when to require a physical presence, and how often such in-person meetings should take place.

This is not a simple undertaking. The moments that matter vary by roles and processes. Organizations need to accept that they may not get it right the first time and should treat this as a continuous experiment in which they regularly measure productivity, collaboration, innovation, and community. In short, companies need to understand both what is working (and scale it) and what is not working (and change it).

Organizations need to accelerate building a real capability around the right way to do hybrid work, especially as more work returns to the workplace. This process is unlikely to stop even when functional herd immunity is achieved. Implemented correctly, the hybrid-working model brings a real competitive advantage because employees will have the flexibility that enables them to be more productive while still feeling that they belong to an energizing community .

Leaders will need to make decisions about office real estate, namely: What kind of office footprint will the organization have (how much space is needed) and what will the working experience be like inside—and outside—that footprint (how will people work)? Footprint needs depend on the average size of the group required to foster meaningful interactions. For instance, if the vast majority of a company’s interactions are in smaller groups or teams, it can consider shifting offices to a greater number of small locations, rather than being anchored to a few large hubs.

When it comes to the experience, businesses will need to create a seamless model  that makes it possible to work from anywhere—whether from a company office, home, coworking stations, or other venues. They will also need to adapt their physical spaces to focus on social and collaborative interactions rather than on providing spaces for individual work. As the post-COVID-19 era evolves, workers may expect companies to provide a more appealing office experience, which may require new thinking on digital experiences, amenities, and other aspects of working life. Organizations will need to analyze how they use space and how to repurpose the space they have to get the most value. They may also want to push for more flexible leases; ideally, landlords will become solution providers that work with companies as they reimagine their space.

Finally, in the coming weeks and months, companies will need to get relentlessly practical about the return to work, going far beyond platitudes about hybrid work and flexibility. They will need to define clear guidelines, for instance, about when they expect people to show up in person for the moments that matter. They will need to define which decisions will be taken by top managers, and what latitude team managers will have to decide the extent of their in-person work. Site-based pilots, where practicalities such as meeting-room bookings, cross-silo team collaboration, and space requirements, will be critical to minimizing friction as people start to return in larger numbers.

Organizations need to accelerate building a real capability around the right way to do hybrid work, especially as more work returns to the workplace.

4. How can we reimagine capital allocation to promote resilience?

Capital allocation used to be primarily about making large bets early, based on a distinctive knowledge of trends that could take years to play out. During 2020, a year of extreme uncertainty, it became clear that this view needs to be complemented by a new way of thinking . Specifically, companies need to develop a capital-allocation process that allows them to create value by navigating fast-moving disruptions that can manifest themselves over days or weeks, as opposed to years.

In 2018, McKinsey analyzed the performance of 1,100 companies  during the 2008–09 recession and identified those that did especially well (“the resilients”). The resilients did not lead their sectors in any special way before the recession occurred, but they moved faster than their peers to maintain earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) at slightly higher levels by the time of the trough, an advantage they then sustained. Indeed, they grew EBITDA quarter after quarter, allowing them to invest more than their peers and create significantly greater value. Ten years after the recession, 75 percent of the resilients were still outperformers. The conclusion: their performance during the disruption helped them create a competitive advantage that was very tough for others to claw back when growth resumed.

In 2020, McKinsey repeated this analysis  with more than 1,500 companies, and the findings were similar: a small group of companies were successfully navigating the pandemic-related business disruption to create value. Interestingly, the research found that the companies that managed to invest their capital in a balanced way—across growth, margin, and optionality—did better than those that focused only on a single dimension, such as growth or cost cutting.

Navigating business disruption deftly is easier said than done. One critical capability is “trigger-based capital allocation.” This involves defining a set of big moves, such as M&A, portfolio reallocation, or divestitures, that could significantly alter the shape of the business. Then, the company defines specific conditions, or triggers, under which it would take the proposed action. Finally, the company needs to have a clear mechanism for identifying whether these conditions have occurred—and it has to be able to move quickly when they do. To make trigger-based allocation work, top leaders need to agree on the goals related to capital allocation, and they need to set up a monitoring mechanism so that they are ready to act.

5. What broader role should organizations play in their communities?

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global humanitarian challenge. It is right, then, that companies take stock and consider their responsibilities—not only to their shareholders but also to their employees and the societies where they operate .

In the United States, for example, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected women , minorities , people of color , lower-income workers , and small businesses . Students have also been widely hurt , as schools and colleges largely shifted to remote learning.

Businesses have a role to play in rebuilding robust economies and in improving their communities. As a part of their corporate social-responsibility efforts, companies should consider which areas to prioritize, based on the strengths of their organization and on what their people value most. Efforts can be small, such as ordering takeout from local restaurants to help support small businesses. They can be in the form of services, such as counseling small-business owners on how to adapt in the COVID-19 era. They can be more systematic, such as directing job creation and recruitment to those in hard-hit cohorts, or investing in training to equip new graduates to find jobs or help vulnerable workers gain new skills so they can evolve in their current role or change careers. In any case, leadership needs to take an active role.

In June 2020, McKinsey asserted , “An organization designed for speed will see powerful outcomes, including greater customer responsiveness, enhanced capabilities, and better performance in terms of cost efficiency, revenues, and return on capital. The speedy company might also find it has a higher sense of purpose and improved organizational health. These outcomes are possible, but not inevitable.”

Nine months later, we think that this analysis is as sound as ever. Speed matters, but not at the cost of making mistakes or burning out. By asking the right questions, business leaders can improve the odds of negotiating the next normal successfully, and in so doing, help themselves, their employees, and their communities.

This article was edited by Cait Murphy, a senior editor in the New York office.

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Researchers Dig Into How the Pandemic Is Impacting Business

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During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, many high school students embraced innovation . For Caleb A., a senior at Sandy Creek High School in Tyrone, Georgia, that took the form of Up Next Finance , a website to help high school students understand investing, economics and personal finance . “My mission is to help people learn about finance and create a better life for themselves,” says Caleb, who has also turned to TikTok to share finance tips.

Like any good researcher, Caleb couldn’t help but observe the shifting financial scene during COVID, initially with a plummeting stock market that was 30% off its high. That volatile landscape prompted him to also write Teenage CFO , a book on finance that includes a case study about how the pandemic is affecting business.

“My overarching point is that certain industries benefited from the pandemic, while others saw catastrophic effects happen to them,” notes Caleb. “You look at the airlines, cruise operators, hotel, travel and lodging. They saw their businesses being crippled by the pandemic and revenues fell off a cliff…On the other side, we look at technology: Amazon, Apple, HP, all these companies have benefited from remote work and work outside of the office. They saw huge gains in their revenues and huge gains in usage and traffic to their websites.”

Caleb is not alone in his pursuit of understanding the pandemic effect. The advance of the Coronavirus, quarantine, vaccination and the slow emergence from the crisis have given researchers the opportunity to study issues they’ve been interested in for years. It has, in many ways, been an experiment rich with opportunities for data collection and observation.

Needless to say, it has been keeping academics at the Wharton School busy. For example, Dr. Guy David, Wharton’s Gilbert and Shelley Harrison Professor of Health Care Management , has been studying how resources are allocated during the global health crisis. “The pandemic has disproportionately affected disadvantaged people, it has disproportionately affected people who lost their jobs, it has disproportionately affected people who needed care and had to get it virtually. It gave us the opportunity to shed some light on these issues and get some very important variation that we didn’t have before,” says Guy David, Wharton’s Gilbert and Shelley Harrison Professor of Health Care Management.

As we think about the pandemic’s effect on business, here are some of the latest investigations in which researchers are digging into the data:

Productivity and Innovation . Michael Parke, a Wharton professor of management , supervised a survey-based study on productivity and innovation that was commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Boston Consulting Group and KRC Research. The study polled about 9,000 managers and employees in large firms in 15 markets across Europe, with about 600 respondents per country. Productivity and innovation are two factors that drive business success. The study found that productivity – how effectively employees work and produce goods and services — has remained stable or even increased for many companies that shifted to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. However, innovation has taken a hit as both leaders and employees feel more distant from each other.

One of the bigger lessons in the study, Parke said during an interview on Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM Ch. 132, is the “learning opportunity” that the pandemic is providing for companies. ”This experiment that was forced upon us is showing that employees are able to be productive, and there are some things they really enjoy about that autonomy, so that trust is something organizations should really increase,” he said. “At the same time, [they should be] developing the capabilities to maintain good collaboration in this remote working environment, because flexibility for individuals obviously can create some collaboration challenges as well.”

“When you make decisions laser-focused on efficiency, you might be missing on resilience.” — Santiago Gallino, Wharton Professor

Economic Impact . The Penn Wharton Budget Model has been hard at work during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing research and economic analysis that help explain the fiscal impact of public policy . These numbers can help policymakers arrive at better decisions about new laws and regulations that are based on solid data. The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s economists and data scientists have studied everything from pandemic job losses to how the economic recovery hinges on the vaccine rollout.

One of PWBM’s most recent studies updates its research on the long-run effects of learning loss on the economy – in other words, how will the pandemic school closures (all those hours in Zoom class!) and resulting levels of learning loss ultimately impact the labor market and how productive workers can be? Studies have found that remote education reduces learning outcomes for students and that current students are likely to earn less in future wages.

The good news: the Budget Model’s latest findings after digging into the numbers suggest that student learning loss was not as great as previously reported. Still, there will be some effects on future productivity. Would a proposal to extend the school year and the learning make things better? The summary: “Using recently available data on learning loss from pandemic school closures, PWBM estimates that projected 2051 GDP (Gross Domestic Product ) is 1.4 percent lower than it would have been without the learning loss. Extending the 2021-22 school year for all public schools by one month would cost $78 billion and limit the reduction in 2051 GDP to 1.0 percent.”

Broken Supply Chain . The supply chain crisis is among the greatest pandemic lessons learned for businesses. It began with empty store shelves and supply shortages (toilet paper!) way back in March 2020 and has continued to plague companies. The COVID-19 pandemic caused product shortages in the second quarter of 2020 as factories closed and people who were stuck at home didn’t buy as much. The supply chain woes continue, with fewer parts to make products (like computer chips) and a labor shortage. Cargo ships are circling ports, containers filled with merchandise sit undelivered in giant containers, and stores just don’t have as much product to sell during their busiest season of the year.

Supply chain disruptions rippling through wholesale, retail, transportation and labor, said Wharton’s Santiago Gallino, a professor of operations , information and decisions, present an opportunity for companies to rethink the resiliency of their supply chains. Supply chain efficiency – making sure products are created, shipped and sold in the best way possible – is always a priority for companies. But now, suggested Gallino during an interview on Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM Ch. 132, companies also need to be thinking about resiliency, or how quickly they can adapt to disruptions and maintain normal business operations. “When you make decisions laser-focused on efficiency, you might be missing on resilience,” he said. “Companies have discovered if it’s one shock that lasts a relatively short time, you can manage and take the pain and the hit. But when this has been going on for several months, now the issue of thinking very carefully about how you can be more resilient going forward is an interesting conversation.”

And it’s an even better topic for research. As businesses are assessing their existing supply chain from end-to-end and identifying gaps and vulnerabilities, the researchers are watching, surveying, gathering data and generating insights. Stay tuned for the findings.

Conversation Starters

Caleb A. worked on an innovative project throughout the pandemic. Did you also embrace innovation? Share your story in the comment section of this article.

What are some of the learning opportunities mentioned in the article or implied here that will help businesses work better and smarter? What are other business-related observations from the pandemic?

Why is the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s research and economic analysis so important to the future of business?

9 comments on “ Researchers Dig Into How the Pandemic Is Impacting Business ”

I think that the core idea of how the pandemic can be a learning opportunity for all of us, in any scenario, is a really powerful thing. Life always gives us challenges, but it is the way that humans adapt that truly defines how great we can be. By making the most out of situations, we allow ourselves a chance to grow as a person and develop new skills, and by thinking about problems in a positive way like this, we ourselves become happier and more productive.

We all know about the disruption and decline that the Covid – 19 Pandemic has led to in terms of the growth of innovations and existing businesses. However, the fact that the pandemic has actually influenced certain innovations positively is also a point to consider. This is evident through Caleb A’s innovative project that he executed throughout the pandemic and also many other startups founded by other people all around the world. As a 13 year old, I have personally evolved in terms of my knowledge of technology. During these hard times, I tried to use my time wisely and productively in order to gain more knowledge. I spent most of my time experimenting with electrical components which has made me more aware of programming chips and solving problems through the use of technology. I tried to solve daily life problems by building small robots. One such instance where we can see this is when I created one of my first automatic sanitiser dispensers. Slowly and gradually, when I actually created a working prototype with sensors and relay modules, I realised that by creating this product, I was solving a problem. Sanitising regularly during lockdown was a must for each and every one of us and the fact that I had created a product that helps us sanitise our hands without any physical contact with the sanitiser bottle directly felt like an achievement. This product already existed before and was being produced by various companies, but knowing that I had created one by myself at home was an accomplishment. The prototype that I had created was made simply for my personal use and not for startup purposes. From this, we can infer that the pandemic actually led to learning opportunities form people of all age groups and also helped people embrace innovations. Although, in my case, I utilised these hard times by messing around with electrical components at the age of 13 to further gain more knowledge so that I have all the information that I need about diverse aspects for executing my first innovation in the future.

Brilliant work, Caleb and the Wharton Global Youth team! I think this is an extremely pertinent issue due to the times we are in currently – particularly one that strikes close to home.

My city, Mumbai, is home to numerous small businesses, especially small book vendors who sell their wares on footpaths throughout the city. These vendors, through whom I had grown from reading Geronimo Stilton to John Keynes, were struggling to sell a single book during the pandemic, given how heavily reliant their business models were on physical sales, and how averse they were to the internet and technology.

I didn’t blame them. Amazon and Flipkart have wiped out a majority of them with predatory pricing and heavy discounts via cash burning. Caleb is bang on the money when he describes the growing rift between traditional business models and technological ones. The latter didn’t just win due to the pandemic. COVID-19 was just the crushing, final blow to physical revenue models.

With broken supply chains and consumer demand reaching new lows, these book vendors were struggling to survive. Thus, using the synchrony of the skills and entrepreneurial spirit I had, I launched The RoadSide Bookstore, a dropshipping start-up to help these vendors sell their books online.

Reaching 40 countries and over 50,000 people, I’ve realized the indisputable and ever-growing power of technology. As very correctly stated by Prof Guy David, the pandemic has disproportionately impacted the lower strata of society, one that was already disadvantaged, and has aggravated their suffering, while tech companies have minted money throughout the pandemic.

I believe that the most important thing this pandemic has taught us is that technology is a great tool to achieve equity. With the Internet being as widespread and accessible as it is today, it brings endless opportunities to almost anyone, anywhere on the planet. It’s the one way that traditional businesses and even those working from home can remain strong in the face of their respective adversities. Even though we work and study from home, technology connects us as if we’re right next door. Prof Gallino espouses the right mindset perfectly – “When you make decisions laser-focused on efficiency, you might be missing out on resilience.”

I believe that’s exactly what we need for all those impacted by the pandemic to get through it and emerge stronger, bolder, and more confident. Mind you, the economic and educational impacts of COVID-19 can’t be reversed. The pandemic will be a part of our history. However, it’s up to us to decide whether this is a crushing, last blow or a minor blip in our history of innovation. Technology is truly the great equalizer.

Hi Kush! I would first like to thank you for employing drop-shipping in a productive, positive, and genuinely beneficial way. For too long has drop-shipping been associated with fake social media “entrepreneurs”, and I am glad to see someone use it not as a means to profit but to help their community.

That being said, I am very curious about the e-commerce sphere in India. Of course, global shopping has moved increasingly virtual in the past decade, but is it the same for a population-dense city like Mumbai? When I lived in Qingdao, China (a city with over 10 million inhabitants), I noticed that there were also a lot of local bookstores. Because of the city’s emphasis on public transport, increased foot traffic led to more customers for these bookstores. In fact, bookstores became so popular, that they became common hangout spots for students after school. I am not sure how badly COVID-19 has damaged bookstore operations in China but I imagine it’s quite significant given China’s strong Zero-COVID policy. The Indian response to COVID was less extreme than China but you mentioned that Mumbai stores struggled to sell any books during the pandemic which is very unfortunate. Aside from drop-shipping do you think there are outlets for these vendors to expand their consumer base? While online shopping is no doubt more efficient and sometimes cheaper, the novelty of being surrounded by books and flipping through them cannot be replaced. With COVID settling down, perhaps vendors could leverage the nostalgia factor of bookstores and create more business opportunities.

Finally, you mentioned that “technology is truly the great equalizer.” Given your earlier statements about the pandemic disproportionately affecting the lower strata of society and how tech companies are pushing predatory practices on local businesses, I believe that your final sentiment is not entirely correct. It is precisely because technology is not equal that businesses who are not with the times can still have paths to success. I hope Mumbai, its many local vendors, and your start-up may all fight through the pandemic and be prosperous.

Wow Kush, I am beyond impressed with your startup and how far you’ve extended your hands to others around the globe! I respect that you took initiative to resolve real-world issues affecting your community and I am positive that there are many others out there like you. It is definitely not an easy endeavor when the pandemic has so abruptly destroyed our normality. Like you, I also grew up reading about the wonderful adventures of Geronimo Stilton and his friends to reading life-changing novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird” through local book vendors in my city. Thus so, I deeply resonate with you when you said that the issue of COVID-19 impacting local businesses struck close to home.

As soon as the waves of the pandemic hit, businesses were quick to establish online shops to maintain profits. However, this was not the case for every business. Many businesses located in disadvantaged areas lacked the resources necessary to list and advertise their items online while big service corporations like Amazon thrived in such deadly circumstances. Just to emphasize, Amazon’s profits have grown by 220% ever since COVID-19 made its mark in 2020. With just a click of a few buttons, one can almost instantaneously purchase what they normally would at any physical book store, whether it’s textbooks for school or the latest book by their favorite author. Doing this especially devalues local bookstores, such as Turn the Page Again, who sell books sustainably while also donating their profits to non-profit organizations.

Given these issues, it is safe to say that your statement regarding technology being a great tool to achieve equity is only a sliver of the truth. While technology has no doubt drastically eased the transition to a remote lifestyle, it has also further split a gap between the lower strata and the rest of society. In the United States, 37.2 million people were classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Out of these 37.2 million people, 41% of them do not own a desktop or laptop computer. Doing the math, we now know exactly that 15.3 million people do not have access to the proper technology that’s necessary to even open an online business to sustain themselves. The effects of this digital divide go beyond just businesses, it is also one of the main causes of students trailing behind in their education, especially during the pandemic.

With the ever-growing power of technology comes along the necessity for a bridge between technology and all populations in society. I propose that there be new initiatives launched with the goal of raising money to donate technology to those that are socioeconomically disadvantaged. To achieve this, businesses should reevaluate their missions to focus on combating this issue.

Kush, your startup will no doubt inspire many others to take action and also provide many more opportunities to vendors throughout the world. For our mutually shared love of Geronimo Stilton books, I wish you the best of luck with your future aspirations!

In my opinion innovation is the driving factor that has got us to the place where we all exist today. During the covid pandemic as a 14-year-old living in India, I embraced the opportunity to do something that would help the animals. In a country like India where there is a big problem of stray dogs living on the streets, they are not able to get adequate amounts of food. My friends and I set up drives in our neighborhoods to provide food and water to these dogs. After looking at the nearby businesses failing I figured that businesses have to be more flexible and have better protection against pandemics because this is certainly not the last one. Some of the observations I made were that covid with all of its drawbacks brought some things that have helped businesses be more efficient like online/hybrid mode which has come out to be quite productive and efficient. Since this is probably not the last pandemic, we must be prepared for the worst even in the best times. The businesses have to be more resilient to change to get peak efficiency. The Penn Wharton budget model has been a key in providing research and economic analysis for these businesses to be efficient. It is good for policymakers to implement these studies which are based on real-time data to help maximize productivity in the workplace and minimize the loss. The studies done by the PWBM can help improve the workplace in an efficient manner.

In 2020, when Covid-19 induced pandemic hit the country, everyone was stuck in home. As I had conversation with my peers, I found them to be happy. Why? Because they were relieved from going to school. After few months, many of them were tired of attending the daunting online classes. Even I felt dullness just by sitting in home.

As the time lapsed, I got elected as the Sports Captain, as part of the student council. Meanwhile in the first meeting with other members, after brainstorming, as a council we were convinced with an idea of e-sports fest. So, we planned together and implemented ‘festival de deportes’. While executing it, I realized that business is everywhere, i.e. business concepts are applicable in multiple scenarios. For instance, wherein I started with Market research through circulating e-forms amongst students and then we promoted the event on various media forms, especially social media which persuaded young audience to join the event. To keep it cost-effective we used open-source free software. It helped us make it more accessible.

For me key takeaways were, coordinating and collaborating with people possessing different skills, gaining experience of teamwork. Secondly, customer is centre of business planning. Since we kept our target audience in centre of strategy making, thus we achieved success with registrations coming up to nearly 1000 people. Thirdly, using IT is unavoidable. Without we using ICT, would have been unable to sustain during pandemics. This applies to businesses too. As I saw in many places, people were afraid to go and buy in stores or pay with notes and coins, instead many preferred to use mobile to pay electronically and buy from online sellers to keep covid at bay. Those (businessmen) who accepted it survived, while others suffered. Thus, we have to ultimately adopt technology.

This idea of online sports was even seen in across city, but when I did it myself, I felt I had achieved something. While doing so it is important to remember that IT and computer-based technology requires well motivated and trained staff to see desired results.

From what Prof. Parke said it can be inferred that if employers increasingly delegate authority and decision-making powers to employees, they feel motivated. This empowerment and autonomy are indeed linked with Herzberg’s theory of motivation, meaning workers show creativity and take initiative. This has immensely benefitted some firms, where such laissez faire leadership style has been adopted and led to developing of some innovative solutions. But at the same time, I agree with Professor Parke as maintaining a balance is key. Especially when everyone is working from home it is difficult to keep workers away from distraction. Thus, companies need to develop a robust communication system, which fosters collaboration and motivation amongst employees. Some individuals need clear guidance from manager and thus regular conversation within organisation is very important. Also, it is observed that many businesses do not need an office. In my opinion some companies work better from home, and do not need a brick-and-mortar office. If they continue leasing premises, they are just wasting their money. It would be better for them to move to remote model permanently.

Lastly, looking at the Penn Wharton Budget Model perfectly analyses the business environment, and goes beyond to what most businesses undertake PEST analysis- Political, Economic, Social and technological. For any business and its management looking at insights from this model can prove very useful as it provides rich overview of the market scenario. Similarly, when Government and lawmakers see this model, they can evaluate outcomes mentioned in this and use it accordingly to reshape the countries or global economy. It covers vast areas from Demographics to migration and housing to covid-19 thus even an entrepreneur can plan his future business strategy with help of this model. In short pandemic has impacted all of us in some or the other way.

As we all know about this mask free hopeless covid – 19 pandemic has brought us a big step for the technology industries. The big changes happened to the adults who has a job or not. The pandemic had brought people to be jobless but for the people who stayed in the work the environment had changed. The pandemic had brought people to work on their homes. Where the quarantine worked proved that the productivity in the house did not impact decreasing where some companies had increased their productivity. Where before, the working on the company building was normal and nowaday this kind of moving is unwelcomed to workers. This could make an estimation where after the pandemic this working home would continue by the workers. Thus, countries are directly hitting the effect of the supply chain crisis. For example, after a pandemic the country would work on to prevent this crisis again for any situation. Countries would rather increase work and supply making in their own country rather than dealing with other countries diplomatically. For example, the U.S. had difficulties producing cars because there was no industry to produce semiconductors. On the other hand, Korea had their own semiconductors industries where they had a better situation than the U.S. This means, countries like the U.S. will reshorize the companies where they were out and call other countries industries in their own country. This would have another jobless effect on the other countries. However, the recently hot issue ‘Metaverse’. The Metaverse is simply another fake world inside and living like a real world, the similar version could be VR. This would make the imagination of the technological world such as the movie ‘Ready One Player’ into a real life. The developments of the technology had a big change where this Metaverse is of a big interest now. On the other hand, The OTT business are growing because of the pandemic where the interest of the other countries are increasing. Therefore the entertainment business is increasing in other countries. For example, by the Netflix ‘Squid Game’, K-pop and K-cultures are a big boom in other countries including Korea itself. So, some countries have a K- culture concept of cafe, restaurants. As a Korean this would be the biggest honor. If the pandemic had ended would this kind of business continue? To conclude, some ideas like new where we imagined it could happen in future are now happening such as Metaverse. The country’s culture of working is now changing like Google where they work in their comfortable place and could be focused to make the best productivity. After a pandemic some countries will have a country-centered system, and the economic and cultural effects of the pandemic are very large to return to life before the pandemic. The biggest effect of the pandemic on the business was it made people make a big development on the technology industries that would happen in about 50 years future.

The pandemic was something that changed so many things beyond these parts of the finance and business world, but when looking at these specific sections, it can be seen how the effects on the business world can have such strong impacts. Reading this article explained to me further the effects on businesses beyond what you hear on the news. Since I work closely with some smaller businesses where I live, I was able to observe what changed as the pandemic progressed for their companies, and reading this article was able to put everything into perspective.

The research that is being done particularly about the learning loss with children in school is something that I find interesting. As someone who currently goes to a private school and has a younger sister who goes to a public school, I was able to do some research of my own on the learning loss in private schools vs. public schools during the pandemic. The statistics that the Penn Wharton Budget Model has found confirmed my own observations over the past two years and given me new insight. I look forward to doing more research into this topic and following the long-term effects of the learning loss.

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Surging business formation in the pandemic: Causes and consequences?

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Ryan a. decker and ryan a. decker principal economist - federal reserve board @updatedpriors john haltiwanger john haltiwanger professor of economics - university of maryland.

September 27, 2023

The paper summarized here is part of the fall 2023 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , the leading conference series and journal in economics for timely, cutting-edge research about real-world policy issues. Research findings are presented in a clear and accessible style to maximize their impact on economic understanding and policymaking. The editors are Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellows Janice Eberly and  Jón Steinsson .

See the fall 2023 BPEA event page to watch paper presentations and read summaries of all the papers from this edition.  Submit a proposal to present at a future BPEA conference  here .

An unanticipated jump in business formation during the COVID-19 pandemic may be the start of a trend toward a more dynamic and productive U.S. economy, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 29.

“We find early hints of a revival of business dynamism; but in many respects it is too early to ascertain whether a durable reversal of pre-pandemic trends is occurring,” write the authors, Ryan A. Decker of the Federal Reserve Board and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland.

According to their paper—”Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences?”—applications to the Internal Revenue Service for new Employee Identification Numbers (EINs) briefly plunged early in the pandemic but then rose sharply during the second half of 2020 and remained elevated through mid-2023.

The applications were quickly followed by increases in new locations of existing businesses (establishment births) and new businesses (firm births), and, in turn, by “notable associated job creation,” the paper said, citing Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The authors analyzed business formation (both establishment and firm births) by sector, firm size and age, and geographic location. They found a shift in growth during the pandemic from large and mature firms to more dynamic young and small firms. This shift followed two decades dominated by larger firms and characterized by anemic business dynamism, which in turn followed a period of strong productivity growth powered by high-tech startups in the 1990s.

The question the authors pose is whether the pandemic business entry surge will drive a renewed and durable increase in innovation and productivity growth or whether it is largely a reshuffling of economic activity to accommodate more people working from home.

In support of the reshuffling hypothesis, they observed a “donut effect” with business applications increasing more in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas than in central business districts—particularly for service businesses such as restaurants and gyms, reflecting the shift in where people spent their time.

But, in support of the more optimistic interpretation, they note applications and establishment births increased strongly in high-tech sectors likely to fuel innovation, such as online retailing, software publishing, computer systems design, data processing, and research and development services such as artificial intelligence businesses.

They also noted a “tight connection” between surging business applications and employees voluntarily quitting their jobs and only a weak connection between applications and layoffs. They said that suggests workers were moving to new and higher-paying jobs rather than just scrambling for self-employment income to replace a lost paycheck.

“This looks to have been a genuine substantive phenomenon involving a lot of actual job creation,” Decker said in an interview with The Brookings Institution. “This was a real thing.”

However, the authors warn that young businesses started during the pandemic—and their potential economic benefits—may be at risk in the event of a broad slowdown.

“Start-ups are amongst the most fragile businesses,” Haltiwanger said in an interview. “If a significant economic contraction occurs because of monetary policy tightening … that will have some longer-lasting effects on innovation in the future.”

Decker, Ryan A. and John Haltiwanger. 2023. “Surging business formation in the pandemic: Causes and consequences?.” BPEA Conference Draft, Fall.

The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. The authors are not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

David Skidmore authored the summary language for this paper. Chris Miller assisted with data visualization.

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Wendy Edelberg, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber

April 23, 2024

Andre M. Perry, Manann Donoghoe, Hannah Stephens

February 15, 2024

January 23, 2024

6 ways the pandemic has changed businesses

Food for thought: The pandemic has closed restaurants and boosted delivery services Image:  REUTERS/Ints Kalnins - RC2E0K93SQE4

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• Sectors like healthcare and banking are battered but not beaten by COVID-19 disruption, McKinsey analysis finds.
• Digital delivery features large in the post-pandemic futures of six sectors.
• The World Economic Forum’s ‘Pioneers of Change Summit’ will showcase solutions for a ‘Great Reset’ across industries and regions.

Even with the promise of a vaccine edging closer, economic recovery could be years away for some sectors.

Yet companies that reimagine their operations will perform best in the next normal, according to management consultancy, McKinsey & Company.

In its executive briefing on COVID-19, McKinsey takes a look at how things might develop in six sectors .

Have you read?

These startling pictures show the impact of covid-19 on the cruise industry, how has the mining industry responded to covid-19, portugal's cycling success story during covid-19.

1. Auto industry – down, but not out

Pandemic disruption will wipe $100 billion off the auto industry’s profits, McKinsey predicts, with sales expected to drop by 20 to 30% in 2020. But automakers were already facing disruptions before COVID – including driverless cars, automated factories and ridesharing – and the industry can bounce back, it says.

Opportunities include the huge shift to online shopping and the rise of software-subscription services, which enable people to pay for programmes that unlock features like heated seating or full self-driving capabilities, McKinsey says.

Restaurant industry – innovation still on the menu

Indoor dining in restaurants may not return to pre-crisis levels for months – or possibly even years, McKinsey warns. For full-service restaurant operators, it means developing a new long-term economic model.

There are opportunities to optimize takeaway and drive-through operations and re-engineer menus and pricing. This might include finding the right balance of special offers and "high-margin items such as appetizers, sides, desserts and beverages,” McKinsey suggests.

Banking industry – digital decision-making pays off

For banks, the pandemic has changed everything. “Risk-management teams are running hard to catch up with cascades of credit risk, among other challenges,” McKinsey says. The company expects that automated underwriting will come into force for retail and small-business customers and that this will reduce losses.

Calculating the creditworthiness of a small business using software, rather than having staff make these decisions, could raise margins by 5-10% , McKinsey says.

4. Insurance industry – merger partners at a premium

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) – particularly in the insurtech (insurance technology) space – will be a key strategy for traditional insurers , McKinsey says.

Insurtechs and fintechs (financial technology companies) have been among the most responsive to customers during the COVID-19 crisis and were the first to launch products focused on the pandemic.

“For example, one Chinese insurtech released an array of such products that covered nearly 15 million people after only a few months on the market,” McKinsey notes.

5. Healthcare industry – delivering at a distance

COVID-19 has hugely accelerated the growth of digital healthcare. In 2019, 11% of US customers used telehealth. Now, 46% are using it to replace cancelled healthcare visits , McKinsey notes.

India’s Apollo Hospitals, which comprises more than 7,000 physicians and 30,000 other healthcare professionals, launched a digital health app, Apollo 24/7, in early 2020. Within six months, the app had enrolled four million people, with around 30,000 downloads a day.

Public-private partnerships are also working well and have the potential to “influence the future of healthcare,” McKinsey says.

6. Education – learning to adapt

In education, the pandemic has amplified existing challenges around inclusion, inequalities and drop-out rates. For example, lower-income students are 55% more likely to delay graduation due to the COVID-19 crisis than their higher-income peers, McKinsey warns.

With remote and online learning here to stay, institutions have a “once-in-a-generation chance” to reconfigure their use of physical and virtual space.

“They may be able to reduce the number of large lecture halls, for example, and convert them into flexible working pods or performance spaces,” McKinsey suggests. “Or they could reimagine the academic calendar, offering instruction into the summer months.”

Moving forward

The World Economic Forum’s inaugural Pioneers of Change Summit on 16-20 November will convene innovative leaders and entrepreneurs from around the world to showcase their solutions, build meaningful connections and inspire change across the Forum’s diverse multi-stakeholder communities.

The digital event is an opportunity to share and develop mechanisms for driving a Great Reset across industries and regions.

Individuals can sign up to follow the event , while companies can participate in the summit by becoming a member of the Forum’s New Champions Community of high-growth companies.

The first global pandemic in more than 100 years, COVID-19 has spread throughout the world at an unprecedented speed. At the time of writing, 4.5 million cases have been confirmed and more than 300,000 people have died due to the virus.

As countries seek to recover, some of the more long-term economic, business, environmental, societal and technological challenges and opportunities are just beginning to become visible.

To help all stakeholders – communities, governments, businesses and individuals understand the emerging risks and follow-on effects generated by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Marsh and McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group, has launched its COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications - a companion for decision-makers, building on the Forum’s annual Global Risks Report.

Companies are invited to join the Forum’s work to help manage the identified emerging risks of COVID-19 across industries to shape a better future. Read the full COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications report here , and our impact story with further information.

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The COVID-19 crisis requires an integrated effort from governments, institutions, organizations, and communities to attack this crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has imparted fundamental economic and financial shocks to society on several levels. Even there are now effective vaccines; it is still arguable that ...

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The big lesson from past pandemics? Avoid panic buying, says new research

by Patrick Lejtenyi, Concordia University

COVID-19 upended almost every aspect of daily life, including consumer and retailer behavior. However, it was not the first pandemic that changed how we shop.

In 2009-10, populations across the globe were rocked by the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. Mass panic buying of personal hygiene products, such as hand sanitizer , was common. Just as with the early days of COVID-19, stores quickly sold out of suddenly in-demand items, with supply chains struggling to meet surging demand.

The swine flu pandemic claimed the lives of up to 300,000 people worldwide. Its two waves each lasted around 16 weeks, providing researchers with an ideal experiment to compare consumer behavior and retailer responses to those from the outbreak of COVID-19.

Xiaodan Pan, an associate professor in the Department of Supply Chain and Business Technology Management at the John Molson School of Business, has published a new paper on the topic in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services . In it, she uses the hand sanitizer market to see what was learned from the 2009-10 swine flu event and to develop lessons for consumers and retailers today.

Pan and her co-authors examined hand sanitizer sales from the United States spanning a 10-year period from 2008 to 2017. Weekly statistics were gathered from the NielsenIQ Retail Scanner Data, a database that tracks product prices and sales volumes as well as store characteristics from more than 38,000 stores across more than 90 participating retail chains. The researchers also collected data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track seasonal flu epidemics and the swine flu pandemic across the country.

Pan's study found that there was a surge in demand for hand sanitizer as the swine flu pandemic was declared. This demand surge created initial shortages in hand sanitizer products. However, the industry strategically adapted to the stockpiling behavior, increasing the supply of large pack-size sanitizer products that were in greatest demand. By the second wave of the swine flu pandemic, large pack-size hand sanitizer sales exceeded small pack-size sales, illustrating a shift in consumer behavior and retailer product availability.

The researchers found no evidence of price gouging by the major retailers. They also noted that there were clear winners among retailer types, with warehouse clubs that specialized in large pack-size products and drug stores that provided a great variety of products leading hand sanitizer sales.

A decade of sanitizer sales data

In framing her study, Pan gathered a decade's worth of weekly sanitizer sales data. "We could not just look at the swine flu pandemic," Pan says. "We needed a natural experiment, so we used the 2008–09 seasonal flu epidemic (that preceded the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic) as the base case, and then we examined sanitizer sales during the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic as well as sales through seven subsequent seasonal flu epidemics."

The study revealed three principal findings:

• Consumers and retailers learn from their experience. Comparing data from the two waves of the swine flu pandemic, the researchers found that retailers were better prepared during the second one, with a larger assortment of sanitizer products. While sales declined during subsequent seasonal flu epidemics, it took four seasons for sales to return to pre-pandemic levels indicating that both consumers and retailers held onto their pandemic behaviors after the pandemic concluded.
• Despite increased demand, prices did not soar. Significant price increases were not recorded across the sanitizer category. Changing buying patterns that favored large pack-size purchases actually led to lower per-unit prices for consumers during the pandemic.
• Store format matters. Warehouse-club stores had higher sales increases of hand sanitizers during the pandemic than did other types of stores even though they had a limited product assortment. This is likely because the warehouse club stores specialized in the sale of large pack-size products. Drug stores also emerged as winners, but with a distinct strategy. By significantly expanding their product assortments, these stores attracted customers by offering a broader range of sanitizer options.

"I think the biggest lesson here is that there is no need for panic buying. The evidence shows that supply and demand will balance out quickly without price gouging," Pan says. "Retail chains value their reputations, so they won't want to tarnish them by raising prices during a public health emergency to sidestep negative perceptions of price fairness."

Martin Dresner of the University of Maryland, Guang Li of Queen's University and Benny Mantin of the University of Luxembourg contributed to this study.

Provided by Concordia University

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Americans overwhelmingly say access to IVF is a good thing

The political debate around access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) intensified this year,  following an Alabama Supreme Court decision in February that frozen embryos could be considered children .

An April Pew Research Center survey finds that Americans overwhelmingly say people having access to IVF is a good thing.

Seven-in-ten adults say IVF access is a good thing. Just 8% say it is a bad thing, while 22% are unsure.

There are only modest differences in views of IVF access across most demographic and partisan groups.

Related: Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years After Dobbs

Pew Research Center asked about Americans’ views of in vitro fertilization (IVF) as part of a larger study exploring their social and political attitudes. Questions covered Americans’ views on the legality of abortion and their perceptions of abortion access.

We surveyed 8,709 U.S. adults from April 8 to 14, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

Views by gender

Women (70%) and men (69%) are about equally likely to say IVF access is a good thing.

Views by religious affiliation

Across religious groups, far more people say IVF access is a good thing than a bad thing.

White nonevangelical Protestants and religiously unaffiliated Americans are particularly likely to say IVF access is a good thing (78% each). Clear majorities of White evangelicals (63%), Black Protestants (69%) and Catholics (65%) also say this.

Views by partisanship

About six-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (63%) say IVF access is a good thing while one-in-ten say it’s a bad thing. Another 27% are not sure.

By comparison, Democrats and Democratic leaners are more likely to say IVF access is a good thing (79%) and somewhat less likely to say it is a bad thing (5%) or that they are unsure (16%).

Views by opinion on abortion

Regardless of their support for or opposition to legal abortion, clear majorities say having access to IVF is good.

Those who say abortion should be legal in all (82%) or most (76%) cases are particularly likely to say IVF access is a good thing.

But even those who say abortion should be illegal in most cases generally view IVF access positively (60% say it’s good). And while views of IVF are least positive among those who say abortion should always be illegal, this group is still twice as likely to say having access to IVF is good (40%) as to say it’s bad (20%). An additional 40% say they are not sure.

Views by beliefs about when life begins

When considering Americans’ views about when life begins, there is a similar pattern.

Overall, about a third of Americans say the statement “human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights” describes their views extremely or very well. Among those who express this view, 59% say IVF access is a good thing, while just 13% say it is a bad thing.

Among those who say the statement describes their views somewhat well, 61% say IVF access is a good thing.

A larger share (82%) of those who do not hold the view that life begins at conception have a positive view of IVF access.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

• Household Structure & Family Roles
• Medicine & Health

Gabriel Borelli is a research associate focusing on U.S. politics and policy at Pew Research Center .

Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years After Dobbs

Few east asian adults believe women have an obligation to society to have children, public has mixed views on the modern american family, the modern american family, with a potential ‘baby bust’ on the horizon, key facts about fertility in the u.s. before the pandemic, most popular.

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Covid transformed the U.S. labor market, and it isn’t done yet

After a three-year national health emergency, over 1.1 million Covid deaths , a wave of retirements and high inflation , the U.S. labor force is smaller and tighter than before the pandemic. For workers, that means continued leverage to secure pay gains and better conditions even as the economy cools.

The labor market rebounded sharply from the blow dealt by Covid-19 as it swept the country in early 2020, thanks to aggressive federal relief measures and widespread vaccine rollouts. But the health crisis transformed the economy in ways that have persisted throughout the recovery, and analysts expect its ripple effects to linger despite a hiring slowdown and simmering recession fears.

When the world shut down in March 2020, low-wage workers in hospitality and other service roles saw some of the steepest job losses amid the sharpest drop in employment post-WWII , according to a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study in March. While some parts of the economy have rebounded beyond pre-pandemic metrics, employers in many industries are still contending with staffing challenges.

Spending is back, demand for labor is back, but we have a smaller labor force.

— Wendy Edelberg, the brookings institution

“Spending is back, demand for labor is back, but we have a smaller labor force,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That is one of the reasons why the labor market feels tight and why firms have been reporting left, right and center that they’re having a hard time finding workers.”

The U.S. population is 1.4 million people shy of pre-pandemic projections based on its growth rate before Covid hit, according to an April Brookings analysis of federal data. About 900,000 of those “missing” people would have been expected to be working.

Edelberg attributed roughly 650,000 of those absences to deaths (Covid-related or otherwise) and the remaining 250,000 to immigration policies during the pandemic — particularly Title 42, a Trump administration measure that expire d Thursday night along with the federal public health emergency.

Many of the nation’s workers continue to suffer from health effects incurred during the pandemic.

A January report by the New York State Insurer’s Fund, the state’s largest workers’ compensation carrier, found that during the first two years of the pandemic, 71% of patients with “long Covid” symptoms required ongoing medical treatment or didn’t return to work for six months or longer.

A report from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., also from January, estimated that the economy lost 315 million to more than 1 billion working days among U.S. employees because of Covid last year alone, equivalent to 1.3 million to 4.3 million people’s leaving the workforce.

“At the high end, that’s about double the average number of sick days taken by US workers in the decade before the pandemic,” the researchers wrote.

A key reason the labor market remains so tight is that the pandemic collided with an already aging U.S. population.

Some older workers bowed out of the workforce earlier than planned as employers slashed jobs and furloughed staff. As the subsequent recovery kicked off a hiring spree, many recent retirees came back off the sidelines, but others stayed put.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York flagged a 2.1 million worker “participation gap,” which it largely attributed to the aging of the massive baby boomer population and a surge in retirements.

While job growth is finally cooling down and layoffs have been piling up for months, many employers remain hungry to hire . Government data showed 9.6 million job openings in March , coming down from last year’s levels but still much higher than the roughly 7 million openings posted before the pandemic — in what was already a hot market at the time.

Last month the U.S. added 253,000 roles , continuing a lengthy run of job gains that have been a boon to workers, with many taking part in the so-called Great Resignation to seek out better opportunities and work-life balance, or even entirely new careers during the economic recovery. Others have reaped rewards by sticking around , as bosses add incentives to retain staffers.

Wage growth at the bottom is really making the labor market more equal.

— Arindrajit Dube, UMass Amherst

“We’ve had this huge imbalance between demand for employees and supply of employees for the last couple of years,” said Paige Ouimet, a finance professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s slowly starting to shift,” she said, “but it is still a different situation in terms of the bargaining power that employees have relative to their employers.”

An NBER study from March found that wage gains among the lowest-paid workers have substantially slowed the growth of income inequality. Arindrajit Dube, a study co-author and economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said the scale of low earners’ pay gains was striking — rising 6% from January 2020 to September 2022.

“Wage growth at the bottom is really making the labor market more equal,” Dube said.

Lower-wage workers have been pulling in more income “because they’ve been able to leave, because they’ve been able to find better jobs,” he said. The trend has fanned a pandemic-era surge in labor organizing efforts , including at name brands such as Starbucks and Amazon, as workers test their leverage.

There are also signs that the tight competition for workers is increasing labor participation among certain groups.

According to Brookings, women ages 25-54 boosted their labor force participation by 1.5 percentage points since 2019, and Black people aged 25-64 did so by 1.7 percentage points over the same period.

Some demographics, however, are seeing the opposite trend. “White men of all ages and older white women are participating less” in the workforce, the Brookings researchers wrote . Labor force participation among white men ages 20 and older stood at 70.1% in April , down from 71% in March 2020.

The 23% labor force participation rate among people with disabilities is up from 20.7% in 2019, according to federal employment data . The uptick reflects the many disabled workers who have entered the workforce during the job boom — as well as the increase in people working with long Covid.

Remote and flexible work arrangements have made many jobs more accessible to those with disabilities. Government data showed 27.5% of private employers allowing full- or part-time telework as of last fall, the latest data available.

“I’m very confident that the ability to work remotely will continue to affect who works and who doesn’t,” said Edelberg of Brookings. “Those effects are not fully settled down in the data. That’s with us for a long time.”

J.J. McCorvey is a business and economy reporter for NBC News.

Sara Ruberg is an associate producer with NBC News.

Brian Cheung is a business and data correspondent for NBC News.

The unlearned lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic

Four years ago this week, there was only one subject on Canadians’ minds: the incipient COVID-19 pandemic. Schools and businesses were locked down in most of the country. The death count was appalling: close to 1,900 in the first full week of the month. In all, about 4,300 Canadians would die that May – with far more brutal waves of infection and death to come.

The story is much different today. Thanks to the rapid development, approval and delivery of vaccines – an amazing human accomplishment that isn’t celebrated enough – COVID-19 has been brought to heel and is now largely seen as just one more viral disease, like the flu or common cold. The availability of home testing kits means most people who become infected by the latest variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can manage the disease at home, and never trouble the health care system.

That’s good, but it hides the troubling fact that it is difficult to discern coherent policies at any level of government for continuing the fight against COVID-19, for dealing with its long-term effects, or for preparing for another pandemic.

First and foremost, the pandemic is still going on. While infection rates are stable, there were still 3,320 new cases and 94 deaths from April 7 to April 20, according to federal data. That’s more than six deaths a day. And the number of cases is undercounted, given that many people won’t bother to report a positive home test to the government.

As well, there is a continuing “long COVID” crisis in Canada, in which symptoms – sometimes debilitating ones – last months or even years. A Statistics Canada report from last December found that 2.1 million people were experiencing long COVID symptoms as of June, 2023.

Meanwhile, vaccination rates have plunged. Barely one in five people had received the recommended dose for their age group and health status as of the end of February, according to federal data. Even the rates for the vulnerable elderly have fallen. Only 55 per cent of people aged 70-79, and 61 per cent of those over 80, have had the recommended dose.

Equally concerning is that there has never been a public inquiry into the handling of the crisis. That means the public can have little confidence that, in a future epidemic or pandemic, there won’t be a repeat of Ontario’s infamous snafu, where the provincial government put millions of dollars of personal protection equipment into a warehouse after the 2003 SARS epidemic in Toronto, and then let the contents expire without being replaced, contributing to a shortage of PPE in the COVID crisis.

Ottawa has signed a 10-year agreement with a Montreal company to supply N95 respirators and surgical masks, but that hardly counts as a comprehensive plan to build a national stockpile of PPE available to every province.

On the vaccine-supply front, Moderna, one of the developers of the mRNA COVID vaccine, is opening a plant in Montreal this year that will provide Ottawa with a minimum of 30 million doses a year. The facility will also research emerging viruses and develop new vaccines.

But that bit of good news can’t hide the fact that there is no joint federal-provincial planning for handling the next pandemic. It’s more accurate to say the provinces and Ottawa are operating in their own silos, making little apparent effort to co-operate on a national scale and instead looking after partisan political concerns.

This may well be the most lasting and damaging legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada: the politicization of science and public-health measures. Where most Canadians feel that governments did what they had to do in a fast-moving crisis, some saw the lockdowns and vaccine mandates as infringements of basic rights that silenced scientific inquiry and public debate.

This space has long argued that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposed vaccine mandates on truckers as a wedge issue in the 2021 election. The illegal 2022 trucker occupation in Ottawa, and the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act to end it – something a court has since ruled was unjustified – was the climax of that tension.

The handling of the COVID-19 crisis remains a bitterly divisive issue in Canada, but no politician at any level seems interested in reconciling the different sides. That, along with the collapse of an effective vaccination strategy and the lack of future-proofing, demonstrate that Canadians and their leaders aren’t heeding the lessons of the pandemic.

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Long Covid at Work: A Manager’s Guide

• Katie Bach,
• Ludmila N. Praslova,
• Beth Pollack

Nearly 18 million U.S. adults have long Covid, a multisystem illness that sometimes appears after a bout of Covid-19. Its wide range of symptoms vary from person to person, veer from mild to severe, and can wax and wane over time. There are no official treatments for long Covid; while some people see their symptoms resolve, others remain chronically ill. For those employees, the right workplace support can be transformative. Employers must not only help these individual employees but also build disability inclusion into their cultures and talent practices. A menu of accommodations along with individual job redesign efforts will help companies retain employees with long Covid and other chronic illnesses and enable them to contribute more than they could otherwise.

It’s time for organizations to be inclusive of employees with chronic illnesses. Here’s how.

Before the pandemic, Dara was a research engineer, thriving in a job that involved complex technical design and problem-solving. (Names in this article have been changed for privacy.) She was also an avid baker and a voracious reader. Then in March 2020, she got Covid-19. Even after the acute illness had passed, many symptoms remained: Dara struggled to sit up for more than half an hour, was too breathless and lightheaded to walk even short distances, and had severe brain fog that left her unable to hold a conversation or write an email. She used all of her paid and unpaid leave to rest and try to recover. Eventually she improved enough to return to work — but she knew her job needed to change.

• Katie Bach works with companies to improve job quality and employee experience. She has written extensively about the labor market impact of long Covid, including as a former nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and serves as board chair of PolyBio Research Foundation , which focuses on complex chronic conditions. Follow her on LinkedIn . kathrynsbach
• Ludmila N. Praslova , PhD, SHRM-SCP, uses her extensive experience with neurodiversity and global and cultural inclusion to help create talent-rich workplaces. The author of The Canary Code , she is a professor of graduate industrial-organizational psychology and the accreditation liaison officer at Vanguard University of Southern California. Follow Ludmila on LinkedIn .
• Beth Pollack is a research scientist at MIT . She studies long Covid and associated illnesses and leads research on their overlaps and shared pathophysiology in MIT’s Tal Research Group. Beth is the chair of the ME/CFS Less Studied Pathologies Subgroup and a member of the ME/CFS Research Roadmap Working Group at the National Institutes of Health, working to create a national plan to advance research on the illness toward clinical trials. Currently collaborating on three clinical studies on long Covid and associated chronic illnesses, she is a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative and a former senior researcher at Harvard University. Follow Beth on LinkedIn .

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COVID-19-Related Studies of Nonprofit Management: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

Márcia r. c. santos.

1 ESCE, Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

2 Information Sciences and Technologies and Architecture Research Center (ISTAR-IUL), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal

Raul M. S. Laureano

3 Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal

Associated Data

During crises such as the present coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, nonprofits play a key role in ensuring support to improve the most vulnerable individuals’ health, social, and economic conditions. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, an extensive automated literature analysis was conducted of 154 academic articles on nonprofit management during the pandemic—all of which were published in 2020. This study sought to identify and systematize academics’ contributions to knowledge about the crisis’s impact on the nonprofit sector and to ascertain the most urgent directions for future research. The results provide policymakers, nonprofit practitioners, and scholars an overview of the themes addressed and highlight the important assistance academic researchers provide to nonprofits dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11266-021-00432-9.

Introduction

The nonprofit sector comprises a multitude of organizations that pursue objectives related to solidarity and community development. During crises, these entities play a key role in ensuring support reaches the most vulnerable individuals in terms of health, social, and economic conditions (Simo & Bies, 2007 ). During the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, government stay-at-home orders, lay-offs, and school closures contributed to an economic downturn that resulted in thousands of unemployed people and decreased incomes. Due to the lockdown policy, many nonprofits had to deal with an increased demand for food aid, shelter, and other basic necessities.

Even as these organizations came under pressure to supply more support, they lost a significant part of their workforce due to health-related conditions or volunteers’ fear of catching the virus. This lack of personnel made the COVID-19 pandemic crisis different from the 2008 financial crisis, when the number of volunteers reached record levels (Tzifakis et al., 2017 ) and helped the nonprofit sector recover. The reduced workforce during the pandemic presented a massive challenge because volunteers are much more critical in this sector than in the corporate or public sector, given nonprofits’ extensive reliance on unpaid helpers (Salamon et al., 2011 ). Given their absent workforce, many organizations were unable to run programs, raise funds, or serve beneficiaries and/or clients. In addition, nonprofits often have small businesses (e.g., charity shops) that finance other activities, which may have seen revenues drastically decline due to the economic downturn reflected in the European Union’s (EU) lower gross domestic product (Eurostat, 2021 ).

In this unprecedented scenario, the nonprofit sector urgently needs researchers’ help to determine how the crisis is affecting these organizations’ capacity to keep running activities. Nonprofit managers also require a clearer understanding of which strategies to implement in response to emerging challenges, public policies’ impacts on their organizations’ capabilities, or populations’ increased demands for emergency aid. Thus, one year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, one of the most important research problems faced by those who seek to help nonprofit practitioners and promote related scholarship is to identify and systematize academics’ contributions to knowledge about the pandemic’s impact on the nonprofit sector. Researchers also need information indicating the best directions for future studies on this topic.

The present study thus sought to contribute to efforts to achieve these goals by answering two research questions:

• What thematic clusters appeared in the research on nonprofit management during the pandemic’s first year?
• What future avenues of research still need to be explored regarding nonprofit management during this and future crises?

To address these questions, an extensive automated analysis was conducted of 154 academic articles’ abstracts that focus on nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic and that were published in 2020. The bibliometric data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and VOSviewer software to cluster the terms used in the articles’ abstracts and create a word co-occurrence map—a popular text mining technique previously applied in similar analyses (Yu et al., 2020 ; L. Zhang et al., 2020 ).

The current automated analysis was complemented by an in-depth examination of the articles containing the most significant terms in each cluster. The results provide nonprofit practitioners and scholars with a critical review of the literature on nonprofit management during the first year of the pandemic and with suggested future lines of research on topics that still need to be addressed. Using these results, grounded in theories relevant to nonprofits’ challenges—such as the contingency theory of organizations and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology—scholars will be able to expand more systematically the existing knowledge about the pandemic’s impacts on the nonprofit sector and help policymakers create an agenda for public COVID-19 research funding for this sector.

Methodology

This study sought to provide a useful, representative assessment of the available bibliometric data on nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out to classify and systematize the data collected. The quantitative analysis assessed the number of papers published in journals (Mas-Tur et al., 2019 ). The qualitative analysis, in turn, focused on, among other features, citations per document, which is a helpful indicator of researchers’ productivity and their contributions’ influence (Modak et al., 2020 ).

Over the course of 2020, a large number of articles on the COVID-19 pandemic were peer-reviewed and published. To classify these publications, identify their research themes, and unveil significant patterns manually would take a great deal of time. In addition, errors would almost certainly be made, and subjectivity could become a constant. Automated computer analysis methods have been developed to respond to the challenges academics face when analyzing a large volume of bibliometric material (Modak et al., 2020 ), allowing researchers to provide a representative, informative perspective on the relevant literature in a much shorter time.

After the bibliometric analysis, the identified clusters of related articles were analyzed in greater depth. This critical review provided significant examples of research on prominent themes and identified short- and long-term future directions for studies on this topic. Figure  1 summarizes the procedures applied.

Research strategy

Data Sources and Search Process

This study used bibliometric data extracted in January 2021 from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, following many previous researchers’ example (van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ). These databases comprise indexed high-quality, peer-reviewed journals, including publications focused on the nonprofit sector. Given this study’s aims, the academic articles selected concentrated on nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two queries were coded containing nonprofit-related terms and keywords applied with reference to the pandemic. The first set of terms used the lexicon validated and applied by Santos et al. ( 2020 ), which was based on Salamon and Sokolowski ( 2016 ) and Smith et al. ( 2006 ) research. The COVID-19 pandemic keywords were selected from the most recent studies of this topic (Aristovnik et al., 2020 ; Verma & Gustafsson, 2020 ). The search queries (see Appendix 1 in the supplementary material for further details) focused on finding both nonprofit and COVID-19 pandemic-related terms in the title, abstract, or keyword fields specifically for academic articles.

A total of 278 articles on COVID-19 were retrieved, of which 124 addressed medical topics. The latter articles had already been reviewed by Yu et al. ( 2020 ), so these publications were excluded from the present analysis to restrict this study to research on nonprofit management issues other than medical treatments and diagnoses. The final sample thus included 154 academic articles published in 2020 in 118 different journals produced by 54 distinct publishers.

Articles’ Profile

The 154 articles on nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic were written by 589 researchers. Of the latter, 37 appear as an author or co-author in two articles, which is the highest number of articles per author. Co-authorship is the most common given that 75% of the articles have 2 or more authors, although half the articles published (49%) were authored by 1 or 2 researchers. This percentage increases to 71% for articles written by 1–3 authors.

An analysis of the authors’ affiliations revealed that the northern hemisphere contains most of the research centers (see Table ​ Table1) 1 ) as Europe and North America represent 62% of the researchers. For each study conducted by research teams based in South America, more than four studies were conducted in North America. Research in underdeveloped countries is in the minority. Overall, scholars affiliated with institutions in Europe (59) and North America (55) are the top contributors, followed by Asia (40), where most studies took place in China (12) as it was the country in which the virus first started spreading. Other research focused on regions of South America (13) and Africa (11), including but not limited to Brazil (3), Colombia (4), Peru (3), and South Africa (4).

Article count by continent and regions with which research teams are affiliated in 2020

The impact and perceived quality of researchers’ contributions were measured using the indicator “number of citations,” which revealed that less than one-third of the articles (46 articles or 30%) had already been cited—85% of which were open access. The articles had been cited 196 times in total, with an average of 4 citations per article cited and an average of 1.56 citations when all the sample’s open access articles were included. This key indicator is significantly lower (i.e., 3 citations) per non-open access article cited and an average of 0.62 citations when all the non-open access articles were considered.

The American Review of Public Administration is the journal that published the most articles (7), followed by Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (6) and Public Administration Review (4). The latter journal published the most cited articles (18 citations). The publishers of most of the articles included in the sample are SAGE (31), Springer (13), Emerald (13), Routledge (11), and Elsevier (8). Table ​ Table2 2 summarizes the top-three journals, publishers, and number of citations.

Summary of top-three journals, publishers, and number of citations in 2020

The overwhelming majority are articles written in English (94%), although some articles are in Hungarian, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. A significant number of articles (49) disclose receiving financial support to cover research, authorship, and/or publication costs.

Data Analysis

Text mining techniques can unveil the hidden patterns in texts such as documents, comments, or reviews (Calheiros et al., 2017 ). With these techniques, researchers can search texts for terms composed of one or more words and uncover patterns based on the frequency with which these terms appear in texts (Santos et al., 2020 ). To apply text mining to the present sample of abstracts, two procedures were followed to ensure that only meaningful words were included, namely stemming and stop word removal (Guerreiro et al., 2016 ). Stemming allowed the analysis to consider equivalent words with the same meaning but with, for instance, different prefixes and suffixes. Stop word removal eliminated irrelevant words (e.g., “the,” “a,” and “or”) or the specific words used to select the literature sample (e.g., “COVID-19” or “SarS-Cov-2”).

The new dataset created by these procedures, known as the “corpus,” was the input for the co-word analysis, which used text mining techniques to identify links between words when they occurred together in the same text (van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ). VOSviewer is an open-source software that helps researchers conduct this type of analysis based on word co-occurrence using a natural language processing algorithm provided by the Apache OpenNLP library, a machine learning-based toolkit for clustering (Wang et al., 2021 ). This software is also well suited for use in data analysis and visualization. The present study followed the lead of the many scholars who have used this software to conduct bibliometric analyses focused on emerging research trends, namely in business and management (Shah et al., 2019 ; Verma & Gustafsson, 2020 ) or on general topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Aristovnik et al., 2020 ; Yu et al., 2020 ).

VOSviewer has proven to be useful for creating network maps of co-occurrence links between words present in bibliometric data (i.e., title, abstract, and keywords), which highlight clusters in emerging research. Each word belongs to only one cluster, and all the words belonging to a cluster appear in the same color on the VOSviewer map visualizing the network of words. This technique provides more advantages than other clustering techniques (van Eck & Waltman, 2009 ).

Using VOSviewer analysis tools, the current study categorized the selected articles’ themes with reference to a semantic similarity and association strength matrix based on the co-occurrence of 60% of the most significant terms, namely those that occurred more than 10 times in the articles’ abstracts. The analysis produced five thematic clusters. Finally, a manual in-depth analysis was carried out of the articles containing the most important terms within each cluster to provide significant examples of research on prominent themes.

Nonprofits’ management faced specific challenges arising from the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study conducted a critical analysis of emerging topics related to the crisis, combining previous literature addressing management theories, perspectives, methods, and tools in order to propose guidelines for future research. The results thus include short- and long-term topics to be addressed by academics.

As mentioned previously, the clustering procedures were based on the co-occurrence of words, allowing to reveal thematic clusters and future research topics.

Thematic Clusters

VOSviewer generated the network visualization map shown in Fig.  2 . Each color in the map identifies a cluster to which the articles were assigned. The larger the cluster’s term and circumference are, the more often the included terms occurred in all the articles, based on full counting statistics.

VOSviewer co-occurrence of terms map

The five identified thematic clusters within the literature on nonprofit management in the COVID-19 pandemic context were labeled as follows: technology (Cluster 1), citizens (Cluster 2), collaborative models (Cluster 3), healthcare access (Cluster 4), and civil society participation (Cluster 5). Table ​ Table3 3 lists the most frequent terms in each cluster and each term’s number of occurrences.

Clusters’ profile

Cluster 1—shown in red—includes 13 terms that fall within research on technology, in which practice, technology, and university are the most frequent terms. This cluster covers studies investigating personnel’s adoption of technologies to steer activities during government-mandated lockdown periods to contain COVID-19’s spread. Technology was also used to increase interactions between organizations.

The authors contributing to this cluster provide evidence that technologies offer competitive advantages and, in times when people cannot meet face-to-face, technology is a tool for survival and for enabling social businesses’ creation, among other functions (Akpan et al., 2020 ). Other researchers discuss the growing power of people and organizations that produce new digital technologies, as well as how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected cities’ ability to counteract the technology industry’s negative effects. Through public–private–nonprofit partnerships, municipalities have continued to create technology jobs without leaving embedded industries and social communities unprotected (Singh et al., 2020 ).

According to Maserat et al. ( 2020 ), Web portals have increased information security, improved the ability to find needed information, and facilitated communication between organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These portals thus strengthen the collaboration between health-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and universities’ medical science departments.

Cluster 2—shown in green—includes 10 terms related to research on citizens, focusing on the negative consequences to children and families of restrictive measures and nonprofits’ decreased capacity to provide services. These academic studies contribute to a better understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated responses’ impacts on refugees, students, children, and families and offer data-informed recommendations to public and private service providers working with these populations. Nisanci et al. ( 2020 ) used their experience working in NGOs in different cities in Turkey to highlight these organizations’ vital role in delivering psychosocial support services to refugees, suggesting new measures that can be taken in the near future.

Researchers also sought to unveil the pandemic’s devastating effects on students, documenting cross-sector collaboration among schools, universities, nonprofits, and other organizations to leverage resources needed to support teachers and students (Berry, 2020 ). These efforts included help for parents, especially those with children with developmental challenges, who experienced additional stress from both restrictive measures and distance learning’s demands (Lučić et al., 2020 ). In addition, the most vulnerable children and families were a specific focus. The cited authors report that restrictive measures caused these children and families to see themselves as deprived of access to vital services. These families were also unprepared to deal with cohabitation when residential care providers suddenly returned adolescents, children, and older youths to their family, who were sometimes unable to care for them.

Pitts ( 2020 ) also examined the consequences of COVID-19 restrictions on illicit drug users and vulnerable children and young people. The cited study highlighted increased violence and likelihood of arrest and the recruitment of young people and children into illicit drug trade as serious concerns. Concurrently, the NGOs supporting all these populations experienced decreased financial support, thereby becoming unable to provide adequate services to the families they normally assist (Rossitto, 2020 ; Wilke et al., 2020a , b ).

Cluster 3—shown in blue—comprises nine terms covering research on the collaborative models applied by different actors and nonprofits, especially those that emerged during the crisis. The main studies addressing this topic focus, more specifically, on government–nonprofit collaborations. Zhao and Wu ( 2020 ) show that diverse collaborative channels between citizens and government can generate different results, especially with regard to the government-organized or self-organized NGOs that emerged as informal channels for citizens to fight against COVID-19.

Other scholars analyzed experiences in which government volunteers provided technical assistance to NGOs in order to supplement their expert human resources and enable these organizations to apply for funding (Tierney & Boodoosingh, 2020 ). Evidence for this cooperative strategy was found by a nationwide survey of nonprofit foundations. The survey results show that most of these organizations partnered with other nonprofit or public sector organizations (Finchum-Mason et al., 2020 ).

Cluster 4—shown in yellow—includes six terms from research on healthcare access, particularly studies related to access to these services in the USA. The related research examined the authorities’ communication strategies and practices implemented to ensure public health instructions were followed. This cluster’s articles further discuss community leaders of religious congregations and faith-based organizations’ struggles and successes with establishing relationships with hospitals, as well as efforts led by school leaders, elected officials, and housing association representatives (Galiatsatos et al., 2020 ).

The relevant studies also analyzed techniques that healthcare centers (e.g., hospitals) applied to deliver services to citizens. For instance, Williams et al. ( 2020 ) studied the use of intensive care unit telemedicine (tele-ICUs) in rural parts of the USA. The findings include that, among other characteristics, nonprofit hospitals’ participation in health systems is more likely to involve tele-ICUs.

Finally, Cluster 5—shown in purple—includes five terms from research on civil society participation, including studies specifically focused on China’s realities—the country where the new coronavirus first started spreading. Academics investigated how nonprofit alumni networks can be used to assist shared struggles, in general, and help to solve major public challenges, suggesting future directions for research on these networks’ value from a public administration perspective (Ding & Riccucci, 2020 ).

Regarding the pandemic’s negative impact in terms of increasing family violence, (H. Zhang, 2020 ) reports alarming statistics on domestic violence due to patriarchal attitudes deeply embedded in Chinese society. The cited author argues that NGOs need to take a more active role on providing appropriate, immediate assistance to abuse victims during the pandemic by updating their information and resources. Locally provided services must include general guidelines for critical emotional support and counselling services, protective services, legal advice, crisis helplines, and emergency shelters. NGOs should also design and publish specific rules regarding domestic violence to help families endure long-term home isolation.

Short- and Long-Term Avenues for Future Research

The insights provided by clustering highlight scholars’ important contributions to supporting nonprofits dealing with this pandemic, but much room is still left to expand the existing knowledge in this area of research. To advance academics’ efforts further, this subsection outlines an agenda for future studies of nonprofit management, which is divided into short- and long-term topics.

In the near future, governments will actively expand the supply of COVID-19 vaccines to their populations. A window of hope should open in all sectors of activity allowing nonprofits to resume more continuous operations due to the expected reduction of restrictive rules after vaccination. In this evolving context, specific challenges for nonprofits have arisen out of the COVID-19 pandemic’s immediate impacts, generating a set of short-term topics that need to be addressed by academics. These topics are summarized in Table ​ Table4, 4 , which connects the topics to the clusters and also to the nonprofit areas and challenges.

Nonprofits’ challenges and short-term future research on nonprofit management

Short-term goals involve restoring or maintaining nonprofit organizations’ capacity to provide services through fundraising and attracting and maintaining material and human resources since these organizations are currently struggling financially (Deitrick et al., 2020 ). Regarding fundraising, federal and national funding campaigns will eventually start, and nonprofits must be prepared to draft well-structured proposals and comply with technical guidelines to gain access to public funds. Thus, nonprofits need to ensure their staff are sufficiently professionally qualified to address proposals’ regulatory aspects and quality standards. Researchers can contribute to identifying successful applications’ determinant factors during crises. In addition, studies should provide managerial frameworks and highlight best practices for managing relationships between funders and nonprofits, which can become tense due to constraints on specific funding programs and their need to maintain a focus on project outcomes (Shaw & Allen, 2009 ).

In terms of attracting resources, fundraising campaigns have never completely stopped, but, in socioeconomic crises, donations necessarily decrease (Brañas-Garza et al., 2020 ). When working from home is the rule and e-commerce becomes a significant trend, the Internet becomes the main tool for fundraising. Research on social media’s impacts is not new in the nonprofit sector. Scholars have already confirmed, for instance, the online organizational content individual stakeholders prefer (Saxton & Waters, 2014 ), determinants of online giving (Saxton & Wang, 2014 ), and aspects of organizational identity construction using digital platforms (Ruelle & Peverelli, 2016 ). Nonprofits’ online presence was found to be significantly related to their resources’ stability during the 2008 financial crisis (Arik et al., 2016 ). Scholars can thus help predict donors’ attitudes toward contributing online to fundraising campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bin-Nashwan et al., 2020 ), but studies on this topic are still rare.

New trends have emerged, namely webpages for writing reviews of and/or providing feedback to organizations (Park et al., 2020 ), crowdfunding platforms’ role in sharing campaigns (de Broeck, 2018 ), and the part played by influencers and celebrities’ appeals for donations (Tafesse & Wood, 2021 ). Researchers need to explore how important donation patterns using these new communication strategies are and how nonprofits can identify the best ways to develop related fundraising campaigns. Investigations focused on this topic should not be limited to proposing theoretical models but instead also conduct case studies to explore successful strategies and innovative managerial tools used to monitor these strategies’ effects on performance (e.g., dashboards) (Fernandes et al., 2021 ).

Regarding attracting human resources, nonprofits currently face both the challenge of reengaging volunteers who interrupted their collaboration and engaging new volunteers despite the ongoing pandemic so that these organizations can provide services. Interruptions have been due to, for instance, volunteers’ unwillingness to expose themselves to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 or their need to dedicate time to their children due to school closures. In addition, extra time had to be invested in adapting to new distance work methods that require workers to dedicate more time to their jobs (Selamet, 2020 ). These realities have combined with nonprofits’ partial or exclusive use of distance service provision (Deitrick et al., 2020 ) to create more challenges in terms of attracting volunteers.

Given nonprofits’ struggle to attract and retain their workforce, scholars could identify the factors influencing volunteers’ levels of engagement during the pandemic crisis, as well as proposing innovative conceptual, theoretical, and analytical frameworks. Other relevant topics are assessments of new strategies to help nonprofits identify, recruit, and train volunteers so that these organizations are prepared to serve target populations in both on-site and distance modes. The existing literature on these areas needs to be strengthened (Baxter-Tomkins & Wallace, 2009 ). Researchers should further analyze digital volunteer training formats’ effectiveness and the adaptations needed to convert on-site work to distance services—a new challenge that emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic. Validations are needed of successful strategies for dealing with this crisis so that nonprofits can decide whether to implement these strategies or maintain others based on their successful implementation in the past (Trautmann et al., 2007 ).

Communication strategies must be analyzed to help nonprofits assess how social media can be used to attract volunteers, namely examining social media comments, likes, or reviews posted by users. Research can provide highlights through sentiment analysis of the positive or negative feedback generated (Selamet, 2020 ) by, for example, sharing past volunteering experiences in nonprofit organizations or beneficiaries’ online thanks in posts. Automated analyses are needed using unstructured data techniques applied in other research areas, to examine sentiments and affect dimensions, opinions, and emotions. This approach has proven to be useful in various areas, providing decision makers with data-driven approaches to business challenges (e.g., Ortigosa et al., 2014 ).

Finally, technological gaps have been a significant obstacle in the past two decades, which organizations have failed to overcome in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. However, the latter has found this problem especially challenging because of the tight funding environment in which they exist and the lack of grant programs focused on investment in technology. Companies and the public sector could become partners to mitigate these gaps because the latter must periodically renew their technological hardware to ensure they remain up-to-date, given the impact this has on performance (Chege et al., 2020 ).

In addition, universities can also be key players, helping nonprofits train their employees and volunteers to use computer hardware and skillfully provide services in virtual modes. Further research is needed to explore successful and best practices in establishing partnerships for nonprofits’ reuse of this equipment, examining strategies and interorganizational networks in the nonprofit sector to identify opportunities (Bell et al., 2015 ) and prevent risks (Martínez, 2003 ; Santos & Laureano, 2021 ). Exploring collaborative strategies in technology or other areas can also contribute to promoting these organizations’ resilience.

In the long term, academic research could contribute to identifying the lessons learned from this pandemic crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2021 ) has already warned that pandemic crises could become a part of future reality. Thus, the research directions identified by the present in-depth analysis of the literature could increase nonprofits’ preparedness for similar future crises. These long-term topics are summarized in Table ​ Table5, 5 , which connects the topics to the clusters and also to the nonprofit areas and challenges.

Nonprofits’ challenges and long-term future research on nonprofit management

Nonprofits have adopted different strategies to fight constraints arising from this pandemic crisis, for instance, eliminating services, delaying capital expenditures and routine maintenance, or freezing discretionary spending (Deitrick et al., 2020 ; Maher et al., 2020 ). Assessments are needed of these decisions’ impacts up to the present. Researchers should further explore how appropriate decisions are from an organizational sustainability point of view. Other relevant questions are how they have impacted subsequent performance during the pandemic crisis and what strategies have been successful and in which fields of activity.

The strategies adopted or rejected by nonprofits have necessarily had a positive or negative impact on the populations they serve. Support provided to beneficiaries, awareness campaigns, and charity appeals, among other activities, were cancelled by various nonprofits due to their inability to provide adequate services (Wilke et al., 2020b ). Future studies need to identify and measure these actions’ consequences for nonprofits and their beneficiaries (e.g., H. Zhang, 2020 ) to help these organizations pay attention to and assist the most seriously affected target populations.

Finally, researchers can help these organizations to contribute in more positive ways during future crises’ pre-disaster mitigation and preparedness phase (Medel et al., 2020 ). Scholars should thus contribute to the design and implementation of preventive plans in order to minimize negative consequences. This research could provide significant advances in risk management theory.

The present study’s results include five main clusters of themes in the literature focused on nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic, which also highlight the topics that still need to be addressed. The articles reviewed were written by academic researchers, who are heavily concentrated in Chinese and US contexts. The pandemic’s earliest cases were reported in China, so the virus’s effects were felt first in that country. The USA was also one of the most strongly affected nations because it had the most recorded COVID-19 deaths of any country worldwide (WHO, 2021 ). Thus, studies of US realities can be expected to deal with public health and socioeconomic crises.

This concentration of studies in the northern hemisphere, with fewer researchers addressing southern regions’ realities, is also visible in the data on authorship affiliation. Overall, quite sparse research was found for the southern hemisphere, in which many developing countries are located, implying that COVID-19’s impact on these nations’ realities is being neglected due to academics’ reduced contributions in those areas. Appeals have previously been made to increase the interoperability of research data repositories, and synergies among research communities would generate more equilibrium between the number of studies in the two hemispheres, thereby diminishing the gap between north and south (Hassan et al., 2019 ).

The current global situation includes the virus’s spread and economies subjected to sudden stops, so academics have joined the efforts to accelerate the gathering of valid empirical knowledge on their societies’ behalf. Research focused on the nonprofit sector has resulted in a significant number of articles published with multiple authorship by research teams. Various publishers have also clearly played a crucial role in making COVID-19-related research open access since the present results show that a large majority of articles are available free of charge. Journals have presented special issues of COVID-19-related contributions, which has also provided a public stage for discoveries in the nonprofit area.

Journal editors’ communications advise authors to expect delays in the reviewing process and allow extra time for authors to submit revised versions of articles or reviewers to conclude the reviewing process. These special measures reflect how researchers have been directly affected by the pandemic, sometimes having to stop their scholarly activities for health reasons. Academics have also had to invest significant time in reinventing materials to teach online classes (Bryson & Andres, 2020 ). In addition, inquiry- and interview-based research may have been interrupted due to fewer available nonprofit professionals or potential participants’ lacking the skills needed to use the relevant digital tools.

Themes Highlighted

The five clusters identified (i.e., technology, citizens, collaborative models, healthcare access, and civil society participation) reveal an initial focus during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year on examining not only nonprofits’ challenges but also the populations they serve. A particular emphasis was put on the effects of interruptions in assistance usually provided by nonprofits dedicated to children, adolescents, and their families (Lučić et al., 2020 ; Nisanci et al., 2020 ). Researchers found evidence that nonprofits are struggling to provide appropriate support to vulnerable population groups, namely refugees or children with developmental difficulties and their families. These individuals currently need help more than ever in terms of psychosocial support, distance learning equipment, or assistance with cohabitation issues (Rossitto, 2020 ; Wilke et al., 2020a , b ).

To respond to this demand, nonprofits should be encouraged to adopt value-creating strategies focused on achieving cooperative advantages instead of competitive advantages (Strand & Freeman, 2015 ). The present study shows evidence of success stories in which organizations from different sectors (i.e., nonprofits, governments, and companies) worked together to overcome constraints (e.g., Maserat et al., 2020 ; Tierney & Boodoosingh, 2020 ). These studies offer lessons to nonprofits regarding how side-by-side cooperation with other organizations in partnerships can facilitate service provision (Berry, 2020 ).

The technological gaps associated with the pandemic are often felt by companies but even more strongly by nonprofits, who lack the resources to invest in hardware, software, high-speed Internet connections, cloud computing, or improvements in their professionals’ technology skills. Some authors see technology as the key to survival in times when people cannot meet face-to-face (e.g., Castka et al., 2020 ), while other case studies found that digital portals strengthen the collaboration between nonprofit organizations and the remaining sectors (Maserat et al., 2020 ). However, nonprofits often struggle to meet financial commitments and find the resources to provide services (Maher et al., 2020 ), and the resulting technology gaps make providing online services difficult, forcing some nonprofits to close their facilities and disrupt assistance to beneficiaries.

When no strategies are implemented to overcome these constraints, nonprofits cannot benefit from cyber-based strategies that can strengthen key principles of membership and participation. These strategies help foster communication between and among members, volunteers, supporters, and service recipients and establish forums for multidirectional communication and interpersonal interaction (Brainard & Siplon, 2004 ). The Internet can save time and money in various management areas, providing benefits to nonprofit managers especially in administration, procurement, human resource management, logistics, training, volunteer recruitment, and fundraising (Lee et al., 2001 ). The COVID-19 pandemic also showed that nonprofits can provide online support (e.g., telemedicine) to reach populations that sometimes do not receive assistance due to distance. This digital transformation’s lessons can be applied in the future to ensure that nobody is left behind.

In the literature reviewed, academics investigated civil society’s role, finding evidence of the positive impact of citizen networks’ mobilization to help public administrators meet challenges (Ding & Riccucci, 2020 ). In contrast, other researchers explored how traditional societies’ values still negatively affect families, especially given the restrictive policies implemented during the pandemic, thereby requiring nonprofits to respond adequately (Finchum-Mason et al., 2020 ). The articles reviewed for the present study also examine these organizations’ part in supporting governments’ efforts to ensure services are in accordance with public health guidelines, which the general population sometimes tends to ignore (Campos-Mercade et al., 2020 ).

Implications for Practice, Policy, and Theory

Researchers have accumulated additional knowledge over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic that should help nonprofit practitioners and communities to pay closer attention to the most critical emerging issues and facilitate improvements in crisis management strategies. Using these scholars’ contributions to theories of technological adoption, the nonprofit, public, and business sectors can follow best practices in this area to deal with challenges arising from the pandemic. Models based on the theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh, 2015 ) can expedite this process as nonprofits must revise their cultural values and communication practices to ensure that they encourage the use of information and communications technologies (Ihm & Kim, 2021 ).

The literature also shows that nonprofits are struggling to attract and maintain material and human resources, so these organizations can exploit all the digital era’s advantages to improve fundraising. That is, nonprofits can disclose additional information in their online spaces regarding their activities to build more trust in their relationships with stakeholders and thus increase online and offline donations (Zhou & Ye, 2021 ). Contingency theory suggests that the way nonprofits respond to these technological challenges depends on these organizations’ internal structure and strategies and the external environments in which nonprofits act (Bradshaw, 2009 ). Given the northern versus southern hemisphere divergences highlighted by the present study, nonprofit organizations may face different adaptation challenges according to their home and/or host country’s political and socioeconomic realities.

When nonprofits seek to strengthen their ability to deal with crises, the literature reviewed underlines the advantages generated by leaders with effective interorganizational collaborative skills. Engaging in isolationist and competitive behaviors and strategies in the current pandemic context produces inadequate results. Cooperative strategies can also strengthen policymakers’ role in vaccination programs since governments can actively engage with nonprofits whose proximity with vulnerable populations can promote the programs’ success. Nonprofits can contribute by clarifying details and boosting their beneficiaries’ confidence in the vaccine as these organizations’ influence proved to be quite substantial in the adoption of nonpharmaceutical procedures (e.g., use of facemasks) (Galiatsatos et al., 2020 ).

Cooperative strategies can also be implemented to deal with increased domestic violence, providing support to nonprofits that were forced to abandon awareness campaigns seeking to increase reports of abuse or to eliminate harmful behaviors—a reality highlighted by the present literature review. In addition, assistance to and inclusion of migrants and/or refugees have been neglected during the pandemic. The population groups shown to be left behind can benefit from collaborations between nonprofit organizations and local governments. Researchers have found evidence that nonprofits play a prominent role in efforts to support immigrants by overcoming linguistic barriers that can prevent the effective dissemination of public policies (Wilson, 2013 ).

Finally, nonprofits need assistance to return programs to their full capacity that were partially abandoned during the COVID-19 pandemic due to volunteers’ absence or decreased donations. Public funding lines should be made specifically available to the nonprofit sector. Smaller nonprofits are especially vulnerable because their Web-based accountability practices are not yet well developed due to their stakeholders’ number and power, as suggested by stakeholder theory (Dainelli et al., 2013 ).

From a theoretical perspective, the present results show that studies of nonprofit management during the COVID-19 pandemic are still scarce, constituting only a part of the entire research on this crisis. Despite academic journals’ efforts to make articles accessible free of charge, editors and publishers need to implement more strategies to increase the submission of papers and reviewers’ availability in order to ensure more articles are published, especially by journals dedicated to nonprofit topics, and in different geographies, other than the USA and China. The five clusters identified in the relevant literature comprise active lines of research, offering academics an overview of the areas in which scholars are seeking to provide evidence based on empirical research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired unprecedented levels of research worldwide. The present findings unveil the themes addressed in academic articles on nonprofit management topics in response to this crisis, underlining the importance of research for this sector. The review generated a comprehensive map of academics’ contributions thus far regarding nonprofit management during the pandemic. High-quality peer-reviewed articles were selected to identify clusters in this field’s literature. Using text mining and visualization tools, the findings reveal that researchers focused on five themes during the first year: technology, citizens, collaborative models, healthcare access, and civil society participation. The results thus provide a theoretical synthesis of research trends, which were subjected to integrated analysis focused on how they are linked to the ongoing global crisis’s realities. This knowledge can help nonprofits develop strategies to engage in this crisis and be better preparedness to future pandemics.

In addition, various inactive areas emerged from the data—research gaps that point to future directions for research based on the challenges practitioners currently faced due to the ongoing pandemic. Critical analysis also highlighted short- and long-term research topics that require more attention. The findings indicate different directions that could advance knowledge about management theory and practices to provide nonprofits with tools to face the enormous challenges presented by pandemics, thereby contributing to societies’ ongoing well-being. Investigations into the identified areas will require varied competencies, thus emphasizing the need for research by multidisciplinary teams.

Limitations

As with any research, this study was subject to limitations. The data selection process restricted the articles reviewed to peer-reviewed publications included in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The decision to limit the sample was taken because of the large number of studies covered by these databases and peer reviews’ positive effect on studies’ quality. However, these choices could be considered limitations by scholars who favor alternative databases or the inclusion of non-peer-reviewed publications.

The automated analysis method applied in this study also produced results in a shorter time so that the findings could still address the urgent need to respond appropriately to this pandemic crisis. Other researchers, nonetheless, prefer traditional systematic literature review techniques based on a manual analysis of each article. These limitations and the future avenues of research identified may inspire scholars to keep investigating the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges and impacts on nonprofits in order to improve their management and promote the achievement of their social goals.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

This publication/researh was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia throught project grant FCT UIDB/04466/2020, UIDP/04466/2020 and UID/GES/00315/2020, and also by Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal [RAADRI program].

Declarations

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Márcia R. C. Santos, Email: [email protected] , https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/mrcss/en .

Raul M. S. Laureano, Email: [email protected] , http://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/rml/en .

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