Research: Women Do Academic Service Work

The latest research, entitled "Giving and Receiving: Gendered Service Work in Academia" by a team of two Danish researchers, Prof Margaretha Järvinen from the University of Copenhagen and Prof Nanny Mik-Meyer from Copenhagen Business School, has shown that in academia, men avoid service work and leave it to women.

The researchers conducted 163 interviews with associate professors and professors of social sciences at three institutions in Denmark. They also obtained their resumes to see if they exhibited service work in their CVs. The findings are that 75 percent of internal "housework" (paperwork related to teaching or committee participation) is done by women, while only 25 percent are done by men.

However, the goal was also to find out how men manage to avoid internal tasks and why women end up doing them. Male associate professors made it clear in interviews that they actively avoid these tasks and do not participate in them unless they evaluate it as beneficial to their careers. The female researchers were also surprised by the openness of the male researchers: "Several of them reported that they were not actively answering emails or were acting in an excessively disorganized manner. This meant that they were assigned fewer tasks, but they were also asked less often, and so they got off without service."

The problem with this gender inequality is that women in academia are really busy, as they are equally involved in internal and external services. Thus, their career path and research opportunities can be fundamentally different compared to their male colleagues. In-house work is rarely mentioned in people's resumes and therefore has little academic value.

Source: Women end up doing the academic housework (kifinfo.no)

Photo: pixabay