Service
So here’s a set of research findings that have caught me completely by surprise:[1] women’s careers in academia sometimes stall out on the road to full professorship because of heightened departmental and institutional service demands placed upon them. So reports Inside Higher Ed, in an article about Judith Glazer-Raymo’s new edited volume, Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education.
This wouldn’t be such a problem, I think, if promotion and tenure processes genuinely valued such service; as it is, the high premium placed on scholarship, particularly at the moment of the review for full professorship, leaves many female faculty lagging behind their male counterparts. (The same is of course true of faculty of color, who find themselves in much higher demand service-wise than white faculty, and whose political commitments often necessitate prioritizing such service.)
The comments on the IHE article are, as one commenter points out, quite telling: a couple of (assumedly) male respondents pipe up with “quitcher whining and learn to say no,” while a number of other commenters point out the often wildly different — and gendered — levels of acceptance of that ability to say no. Men who say no to service requirements are at times seen as wisely protecting the time they need to conduct their research; women who do so are often treated as selfish and uncollegial.
A significant part of this problem rests in a vast disparity in our own internalized senses of responsibility to the collective body, of course, but I think only by starting conversations like these, by creating awareness of such disparities and the quite material effects they wind up having, can we begin to make any change.
Irony alert! ↩︎
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