More Than a Service Burden: The Gendered Impact of Misallocated Work Time on Faculty Emotional Exhaustion

• In Event: Power, Privilege, and Positionality in Higher Education

Abstract

A plethora of research attests to the unequal value placed on different components the
academic trinity of responsibilities: teaching, research, and service. Further, the sparsely
rewarded task of service is often left to women faculty, gender minoritized faculty, and
faculty of color, leaving them little time to complete more valued tasks, like research. Using
Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations and Hirshfield and Joseph’s (2012)
“identity taxation” concept, we explore the gendered relationship between academic work
misallocation – the discrepancy between a faculty member’s formally assigned work effort
and their actual time distribution – and emotional exhaustion among tenure-stream faculty.
Using survey data from 796 faculty members at three research-intensive universities, the
paper examines whether academic burnout is driven by the "service burden" itself or by the
resulting displacement of highly rewarded research activities. Our findings reveal that
research misallocation is a significant predictor of emotional exhaustion compared to
teaching and service misallocation. Specifically, doing less research than assigned leads to
increased exhaustion. This relationship is notably gendered, as women and gender
minoritized faculty report significantly higher levels of exhaustion than men when they are
unable to meet their assigned research goals. However, we find no effect for race, as
racially marginalized faculty in our sample did not experience greater emotional exhaustion
from either research or service. This gendered effect was particularly evident among
faculty not serving in administrative roles. Ultimately, our work suggests that faculty
burnout is rooted in structural pressures that pull gender marginalized faculty away from
valued tasks like research, highlighting the need for institutional interventions to ensure
equitable workload distribution.

Authors

• Sam L Castonguay, Michigan State University

• Matt Piszczek

• Krista M. Brumley, Wayne State University

• Stephanie J. Nawyn, Michigan State University