Service and Teaching: Women’s Hidden Labor in Academia

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Higher Education: Beyond the BA

Abstract

The number of academic women at higher ranks and in leadership positions has not caught up with the number of women in the pipeline. While there are a number of explanations for this issue, including women’s greater family responsibilities, gender bias, and women’s exclusion from informal networks, here we examine an additional barrier: the “hidden labor” women do because of their gender. In this paper, our goal is to investigate previous claims that women shoulder more of the burden of service and teaching. We do this by first deconstructing the concepts of service and teaching within the academy and connecting them to the idea of hidden labor. Then, using survey data from an R1 institution, we ask whether women do more of this academic hidden labor and if this labor takes time away from their research relative to men. We find that, on average, women spend about three hours a week less on research than men. In contrast, women spend more time on teaching and service per week then men, teaching more classes and serving on more committees within their institution. These gender differences in teaching and service workloads explain almost 40% of the gender differences in time to devote to research.

Author

• Christina Falci, University of Nebraska-Lincoln