What is the service inequity?
The American Association of University Women’s statistics on women in academia indicate that gender inequalities persist among faculty and in university leadership positions. While more women are earning PhDs and entering academia than in previous decades, fewer women than men have tenure-line positions, earn tenure, are promoted to full professor, or fill upper administrative positions.
While women make up the majority of contingent faculty, only 44% of tenure-line professors and 36% of full professors are women. The statistics are worse in the fields that have been traditionally viewed as “masculine.” Only 15% of tenure-track engineering faculty are women, and in computer science, the percentage drops to 14%. In upper administration, only 30% of college presidents are women, and women of color, who are especially underrepresented among tenured faculty, make up only 5% of college presidents.[1] In the sciences and social sciences, women are significantly less likely to be first authors, editors of prominent journals, peer reviewers, or invited lecturers.[2]
While the reasons for this gender inequality are numerous, including well-documented gender bias in publishing and grants, one persistent reason appears to be an inequality in service commitments.[3] Women — across disciplines, ranks, and university campuses — routinely perform more university service than men. Whereas both men and women perform external service, including peer review and journal editing that bring widespread recognition in near equal numbers, women take on significantly more internal, predominantly invisible service including sitting on committees, advising students, and organizing student or other university events.[4] This is especially true for female associate professors, who typically undertake the lion’s share of a campus’ service load.[5]
In their book “The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work,” authors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Besterlund, and Laurie Weingart call these types of administrative and service commitments “non-promotable tasks,” and argue that this gender inequality in who takes on this type of work is prevalent not just in academia, but across other industries as well.[6] Their research shows that women are more likely than men to be asked to perform non-promotable tasks, and are more likely to comply when asked. Women also volunteer for these tasks more often than men.
The primary explanation, the authors find, is a “collective expectation that women, more than men, will do the unrewarded and non-promotable work.”[7] Thus, women often agree because they are expected by all of their colleagues to do so, and because men and women alike expect “that women take one for the team.”[8] Frequently when a woman does not volunteer, someone volunteers her, or she is shamed or goaded into volunteering.
Many of these tasks are necessary to the functioning of the university, and contribute significantly to the well-being of staff, faculty, and students on campus, but they are not highly valued when it comes to performance evaluations, promotion, and tenure.[9] They slow down women’s time to promotion and, for some women, cause them to leave the field entirely. Women who take on more than their share of non-promotable tasks or service commitments are forced to either work longer hours than their colleagues or sacrifice the time that should be dedicated to other pursuits, such as research, that are highly valued in the field and would lead to career advancement. As a result, female associate professors often “hit a glass ceiling at the top of the ivory tower.”[10] While it is seen as broadly acceptable for a man, especially a full professor, to protect the time he dedicates to research and other promotable (or valued) activities, a woman is told she is not contributing to the university or being a team player. At the same time, performing what are known to be non-promotable, “undesirable” administrative or service-related tasks often diminishes a woman’s status in the eyes of her colleagues.[11]
The service inequity was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing the invisible labor for most women both at home and at work. Women took on a disproportionate amount of caregiving and household responsibilities, as well as an increase in service responsibilities, including notably advising students and helping universities transition to an online environment.
In addition, as universities responded to demands to address disparities in regard to race, ethnicity, and gender, faculty from those underrepresented groups were asked to take on the additional labor to help address these issues. This circumstance affected women of color most sharply. This unequal emotional and physical load was clearly seen in the decrease in numbers of women who submitted to journals and/ or put off promotion or tenure during the pandemic.[12] And the extra service load went largely unrewarded by universities — as is common[13] — in terms of pay or other forms of recognition.
Unfortunately, little has changed since the return to campus. Inequity in non-promotable tasks continues to affect women’s professional success and job satisfaction by limiting time for work that is critical for their careers and would lead to greater pay equity. And attempting to “do it all” by extending work hours to nights and weekends negatively impacts their personal lives, leading to higher rates of emotional exhaustion and burnout, social isolation (due to having less time for friends, family, and colleagues), and reduced overall physical health.[14]
What Can Be Done
There are several ways to reduce gender inequity in service and administrative tasks. For Babcock and her coauthors, one key is to recognize that gender norms lead women to agree to do more than their share of less visible, less rewarded, and less promotable work in order to avoid the social consequences that stem from defying those norms.[15] Correspondingly, they highlight the tendency — for men and women alike — to “think of asking a woman first” when looking to assign a non-promotable service or administrative task.[16] At the individual level, it is helpful for women to become more aware of the drivers of inequity in non-promotable tasks and how costly this inequity can be to their professional and personal lives.
Further, when women better understand what drives their inclination to do extra non-promotable work and are clear on their organization’s expectations for how much time should be allocated to such work, they can use that knowledge to self-advocate for a rebalancing of the tasks that make up their workload.[17] They also can be more selective, for instance saying yes to service and administrative tasks that align with their skillset or build particular competencies that can lead to longer-run benefits.
And yet, as Babcock and her coauthors stress, “this is not a fix-the-women problem.”[18] An organization’s ability to recruit, retain, and create equal opportunity for women’s advancement involves proportionally distributing tasks that are important but less likely to lead to promotion. Creating a more equitable distribution of work that is unlikely (or less likely) to contribute to career advancement requires institutional accountability in tracking its allocation, clarifying for employees which tasks fall under this category, and eliminating those non-promotable tasks that are not of central importance to the organization to reduce the overall supply of such tasks that need to be distributed.[19]
Employers can also encourage a more equitable distribution of non-promotable tasks by compensating employees for the time they take away from promotable work. Ultimately, if an administrative or service-related task is truly vital to the overall functioning of the organization, performing that task should be acknowledged and rewarded — evaluations for tenure, promotion, pay and other forms of compensation should reflect t
[1] “Fast Facts” Women Working in Academia,” AAUW, accessed March 16, 2023, https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/fast-facts-academia/
[2] Anaïs Llorens, et al. “Gender Bias in Academia: A Lifetime Problem that Needs Solutions,” Neuron 109, no. 13 (July 2021): 2047-2074, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.002; Jennifer M. Krebsbach, “Women in Academia: Representation, Tenure, and Publication Patterns in STEM and Social Science Fields,” Journal of Women’s Studies, 24, no. 5 (August 2022): 1-15, https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol24/iss5/3/; “The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap,” AAUW, accessed March 16, 2023, https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/simple-truth/; Bettina J. Casad, et al., “Gender Inequality in Academia” Problems and Solutions for Women Faculty in STEM,” Journal of Neuroscience Research (2020): 1-33, https://doi.org/10.1002/jnr.24631.
[3] Joy Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work,” Academe 97, no. 1(January/ February 2011), https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling-service-work#.ZAjGduzMLX1; Katie J. Hogan and Michelle A. Massé, “Introduction,” in Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 1-33.
[4] Linda Babcock, et al., “Female Faculty: Beware the Non-Promotable Task,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/female-faculty-beware-the-non-promotable-task; Liz Mayo, “Women Do Higher Ed’s Chores. That Must Change,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/women-do-higher-eds-chores-that-must-change; Cassandra M. Guarino and Victor M. H. Borden, “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education 58 (2017): 672-694, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2.
[5] Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling.”
[6] Linda Babcock, et al., The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2022).
[7] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 12.
[8] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 65.
[9] Babcock, et al., “Female Faculty: Beware.”
[10] Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling.”
[11] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 43; Massé and Hogan, “Introduction,” 2.
[12] Maria do Mar Pereira, “Researching Gender Inequalities in Academic Labor during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Avoiding Common Problems and Asking Different Questions,” Gender, Work & Organization 28, no. S2 (2021)” 498-509, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12618; Jessica L. Malisch, et al., “In the Wake of COVID-19, Academia Needs New Solutions to Ensure Gender Equity,” PNAS 117, no. 27 (June 2020): 15378-15381, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010636117; Marwa Shalaby, Nermin Allam, and Gail Buttorff, “Gender, COVID and Faculty Service,” Inside Higher Ed, December 18, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/12/18/increasingly-disproportionate-service-burden-female-faculty-bear-will-have.
[13] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 43.
[14] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 105-113.
[15] Women do not report enjoying service more than men. Both genders have a preference for research. Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling.”
[16]Babcock, et al., The No Club, 83.
[17] Universities can assist in this effort by offering formalized mentorship to associate professors. Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling.”
[18] Babcock, et al., The No Club, 233.
[19] Babcock, et al., The No Club; Misra, et al., “The Ivory Ceiling”; Guarino and Borden, “Faculty Service Loads and Gender.”
