Exploring Occupational Stress of Female University Academics during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus prominently impacts on tertiary education by digitalizing academic work. This abrupt, unfamiliar digitalization causes occupational stress for worldwide academics. Hence, this research aims to explore the occupational stress and work from home (WFH) experience amongst female university academics. Occupational Stress Index (OSI) questionnaire, and in-depth interviews were employed for the data collection processes. Descriptive statistics, and thematic analysis were used as analytical techniques. Multistage stratified sampling was utilized for selecting the sample size of 348 female academics from state, and non-state universities for quantitative objectives. The findings revealed that, 59.52% of female academics belong to 41-50 years encountered the highest-level occupational stress.When referring to the working parents, 63% of working mothers from state universities have suffered from the highest-level of occupational stress when at least 22% from non-state universities experienced highest level of stress. Role overload reported as the highest stress contributing factor and powerlessness reported as the lowest contributing factor of the study. Twelve respondents who contributed for the online survey were selected at random for in-depth interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify stress coping mechanisms of female academics as results of analysis, four major themes were uncovered: intellectual, imaginative, physical and community oriented.