July 17

Women, Men and Service

A new collection of essays — some with new research findings — explores these contradictions. Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, features many essays that suggest that the barriers to women’s advancement today are less in the form of overt sexism (although that remains) than in assumptions, and larger patterns of the way colleges are organized.

“Some people say, ‘You’ve got the numbers up. You are there,’ but we still have many of the same issues. They aren’t as obvious because there are many more women and the issues are more subtle,” said Judith Glazer-Raymo, editor of the volume and a professor at Teachers College of Columbia University.

One example of that is a chapter in the book, “Shattering Plexiglas,” in which three scholars conducted an in-depth study of what happened to 20 male and 20 female professors in the three years after winning tenure (in a range of disciplines) at major American research universities. They found a series of “pulls” of women away from the scholarly research that first drew them to the academy — and did not find comparable pulls for men. Following tenure, 16 of the women studied and only 5 of the men experienced significant increases in their service obligations at their universities.

The study didn’t suggest that these service duties didn’t represent important work. Many of the assignments were valuable for the professors’ departments or institutions. The newly tenured women — much more so than the men — became academic program coordinators or were appointed to lead institutional committees with real clout. In a number of cases, the assignments also reflected values that were especially important to the women involved, such as playing a role in work to remove gender bias from the institution.

While these assignments may well help these women’s careers over time if they go an administrative route, and while these assignments may accomplish good, they take women more than men away from scholarship. The women reported feeling unprepared for some of their assignments and unsure about how they fit into their careers — but many did not feel they could turn down this role.

“[S]ome forms of service, if not thoughtfully selected and designed, may draw women away from their scholarly learning and from their knowledge construction in the university and society,” the chapter says. “In some settings, women may be positioned to shoulder an inequitable burden of service that is unrelated to their scholarly learning and that may detract from it.” (The chapter was written by Aimee Terosky, Tamsyn Phifer and Anna Newmann — all of Teachers College.)

To the extent that many forms of advancement in universities go to those most immersed in the creation of knowledge, the authors express concern that these service patterns help to create a “Plexiglas ceiling” that women will have difficulty breaking.

Glazer-Raymo, the editor of the volume, said that the point of raising these issues was not to suggest that women should not be involved in service. Rather she said, universities should reward service or — if they don’t — should be sure that it does not fall disproportionately on women. “There needs to be a greater awareness of the imbalance,” she said. Likewise, she said, universities need to look at men. “Men are finding ways to get around those responsibilities. They are more able to say, ‘look this is my priority,’” about their research and have that view respected, Glazer-Raymo said.

The new study joins a growing emphasis by experts on gender equity in academe on service-related issues. A recent study of women at the University of California at Irvine found that many women feel that their service assignments hold them back and that roles that go to women are then devalued by others at the university.

Michelle Massé, director of women’s and gender studies at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, is co-editing a forthcoming book that also looks at the service issue, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces. Massé said that women face a “double whammy” in that many of them want to help students and colleagues, but can have their careers held back as a result. Massé said that the results in Unfinished Agenda are very consistent with what she has found in her studies of the issue.

There is a conflict and a problem, Massé said, whenever women end up with significant duties that are “part of our job but not what we are paid for.” The impact — even on women who have tenure and whose careers are launched — is real, Massé said. “You might move to a new job with your third book. You don’t move with your third university commission report.”

— Scott Jaschik

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Comments

Causation and correlation are two entirely different things that need to be accounted for in this book and paper. For example, are women forced to take assignments more so than men or is it their choice to do so? Additionally, taking a new position fresh from tenure doesn’t preclude one from publishing during and after the administrative assignment is finished. There are plenty of scholars who are amazingly productive even with duties. In fact, one might argue that a larger percentage of leading scholars often publish more AND pursue more administration. This is because they are more dedicated to scholarship than other people, for good or bad.

The assumptions in articles and books such as this are often quite loaded and they lack clear causality or substantiation. A survey of 40 people is helpful, but it only gives a tiny view into what is going on out there in the academy. Was this a philosophy department, science, history?

For good or bad, the ideology of equality will make people try to find things that hold people back, even if they aren’t necessarily institutional or sexist/racist. No one can say that women chose to do more administration because they enjoy the work, or they have a harder time saying no because they want to please more people. No one can creatively think about the subject without resorting to a number of increasingly obvious and unhelpful generalizations.

Finally, people only gain power when they take it. Sociologists who want a balanced and academic world sometimes fail to see this point clearly enough. Women should just work hard and publish as much as is possible, even if it means putting in extra work. I didn’t get to where I am at by doing the same amount of work as others, I did more because I felt that I was behind them. Once people gain a position of authority because they worked harder, then they can dictate more authority. Instead of working as hard as needs to be done, women seem to try to gain more power through administration — a victory, but not a productive one in the sense of scholarship.

Where does this lead us? The dominant discussion on this issue will continue to find more and more institutional problems that are to blame for the shortcomings of others. When they are removed will everything be perfect as assumed? Considering we are living in a utopia today, i’d say that’s the safe bet.

Is this really causation or new?, at 6:40 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Learning to say no....

As a senior female faculty member with a long history of too much service, an active research program, and now a demanding administrative position, I’ve learned to do something that was very hard for me and is for many women- to say NO. For the most part, women our socialized to support others, help, pitch in, and take on tasks and responsibilities; we learn to connect people, solve problems, and grease the wheels. This is admirable, but I believe that this makes it harder for women to prioritize what it is they must do to advance their own careers and personal lives sufficiently to say “no” when the next request to serve on a committee comes in. This does not necessarily result in women not being able to succeed in the academy, but that as they do, they often shoulder more service burden than male colleagues. A transformational book for me on the larger topic of gender communication styles is “Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide,” (www.womendontask.com). The authors do a great job of laying out the differences that can hamstring women, and, importantly, strategies women can use to find better balance.

Dr MCR, Professor and Associate Dean, at 8:30 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Hoisted by Their Own Petard.......

Scott Jaschik put it so well in this report, “the assignments also reflected values that were especially important to the women involved, such as playing a role in work to remove gender bias from the institution. While these assignments may well help these women’s careers over time if they go an administrative route, and while these assignments may accomplish good, they take women more than men away from scholarship. The women reported feeling unprepared for some of their assignments and unsure about how they fit into their careers — but many did not feel they could turn down this role.”

There you have it in a nutshell.

The academic women in question are often driven by a social reformer’s agenda, covet the endless committee assignments which usually liberate them from classroom drudgery, often sense they are unprepared for some of the tasks, accept them anyhow, then turn around and whine and moan about how awful things are!

Congenitally unable to say “no,” they fail to recognize the role they play in their own unhappiness.

Maybe universities should consider instituting policies whereby tenured faculty are restricted to serving on only two (2) committees outside of their own department.

That would streamline things but would provoke howls of outrage from faculty who, like these women in question, love committee assignment, can’t get enough of them, yet dislike them intensely.

Chuck, at 8:50 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Where is Chuck coming from?

[Women] “covet the endless committee assignments which usually liberate them from classroom drudgery.” What? It’s been my experience that committee drudgery is an add on to classroom teaching, not a replacement. And even if it were, the drudgery of committee work is no substitute for the rewards of teaching. I’m awfully glad I don’t have to listen to this kind of misogynistic rant where I work.

Hoppin’ Mad, at 10:55 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Here’s the thing: While being on a committee or service assignment does not guarantee clout (there are plenty of time-waster committees), the service assignments with the greatest impact on the university also tend to be the most time-intensive. If you are in a discipline with relatively few women, it’s especially important to have women involved with outreach, student recruitment, advising, hiring, promotion and tenure, budgeting, and lab space allocation. All of these things take time, and some of them take a lot of time.

If too many of these duties are given to the relative handful of women in the department, the women will have less time for research (or curriculum innovation projects, if you’re in a department that primarily emphasizes teaching) but at least the department chair gets to point to having women in key decision-making roles. There are obvious problems with that situation, but from the self-interested standpoint of the department chair it’s a safer situation than one in which women are not heavily involved in key service tasks.

I don’t have any solutions, and I’m not suggesting that these are valid excuses for over-burdening female faculty. However, I think it’s important to recognize the incentive calculations that department chairs must be making, in order to correct the situation.

Assistant Professor of Physics, at 11:20 am EDT on July 17, 2008

Women’s work?

Every university is short of senior women and therefore every university pressures its women enormously for committee service to make sure they have “representative” committees. And at my university there’s no relief from teaching for the dreck they stack on my desk.When I arrived at my current institution the grad program was a disaster becasue no one could be bothered to put structure in place. A few bigshots could get good students but every one else was scraping dregs. I took it on, established policies and structure, revised the curriculum and recruiting, and now have handed it off to a man.

I made a long term investment in the program for my benefit (every scientist needs good grad students in the lab) that the men were unwilling to make. If I had acted like a man, we would still ahve a disastrous program with only a few bigshots doing well.

Unless the institution inculcates a culture of community and responsibility for all, women will disproportionately carry the burden that benefits Chuck and the others on this board.

Say thank you, Chuck.

biosciprof, Professor at Large R1, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Women and minorities both are overburdened in the “service” category, I have noticed, because they make the search committees, policy committees, et cetera, et cetera, appear to be more diverse. Since there aren’t usually “enough of them to go around” they end up going around to too many committees (that would otherwise be the usual embarrassing collection of white guys). To be asked is flattering and seems to be the fulfillment of an important role, but there is no question it takes away from teaching and research. Saying no is often the right thing for the individual and the institution. I have also, however, seen rare individuals who avoided being asked by raising important gender and minority issues with such enthusiasm on every occasion that soon they weren’t asked.

JMD, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Shaping your service

Another issue here is shaping service: biosciprof was lucky enough to be able to volunteer for a service task that benefited her research goals while also giving the institution some needed “representativeness” on an important recruitment committee. It sounds like a win-win for her and the department, on many levels. Not every female professor is as lucky. My department hired 3 assistant professors in my year and I was the only male. The women were given heavier committee assignments. I don’t know whether it was chance, sexism, the flip side of sexism (making things representative), or their unique qualifications for some of these tasks, but they lost the chance to shape their service involvement the way that biosciprof did. I was given a lighter service load, and I volunteered for tasks above and beyond it because those tasks connect nicely with my research and teaching goals.

If you want to see representative committees and have members of under-represented groups contribute something valuable while still getting research done, let them do what biosciprof did, and encourage them to volunteer for things that benefit their research. Don’t just stuff them on committees to ensure representation.

Assistant Professor of Physics, at 1:20 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

I teach in a small humanities department and I think the committee appointments were knocking at my door two minutes after I received my tenure letter! Seriously, I did learn to say ‘no’, eventually,but when all the men at equivalent levels in the dept. are turning down service work to focus on their research, and when one cares about the department’s health, what choice is there but to subsidize one’s male colleagues’ writing careers?

Does this study deal with the other thing that has a HUGE impact on many women at the associate prof. level — families? Not only are female associate profs. often bearing the brunt of university committee work, they are also often very busy with families, organizing care and activities for their children and/or their aging parents. Perhaps the only choice there is to go back to the early 20th-century model and choose between a career and marriage/family.

Anne, at 3:25 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Women play it safe because our risks are greater

Just my own take, as a tenured woman, but I think it has something to do with risk-taking.

When I was untenured my policy was to do everything possible to get tenure at all costs. I didn’t even think in terms of advancing my career or contributing to my field—I just wanted tenure because the job market in my humanities discipline is very tight and, as a woman, I didn’t see any decent options outside of Academia.

Doing service work is a safe way of earning brownie points so I did that. Working on a research project, you don’t know whether it will pan out as a publication. I also looked for easy outlets for publication and presentation in order to max out the entries on my vita because at my place they don’t really look hard at the prestige of the journals in which one publishes and also one can get good brownie points by reading papers at conferences where it’s easy to get papers accepted. Finally, I set aside work in my own field for work in areas where the standards were lower and it was easier to publish. Once I got tenure it was hard to change my ways. Moreover, I’d lost track of current work in my specialty areas so it was, and continues to be, hard to get back in.

This I think is what screws many women over. First, the risks for women are greater than they are for men because we have fewer viable fall-back positions outside of academia. Secondly, the perceived risks for women are much greater. There was, e.g. a survey of new math grad students a few years ago, male and female matched for grades, test scores, etc. The striking result was that whereas 2/3 of the men were confident that they’d compete the program only 1/3 of the women were.

I think this holds true in general. Most guys going the academic route seem to have the take that while it will be tough it’s a normal thing to do and that if they work hard they’ll succeed. I, and I think quite a few women even now, view getting a PhD and being an academic as a long-shot, a very ambitious project with major risks and opportunity costs, rather than a normal choice for a smart person who is willing to work hard. So we play it safe and that sets us back professionally.

LogicGuru, at 4:15 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Two years in and watching closely...

Like some others on this board, I get no course reduction for committee work, advising, or a multitude of other extra “necessities” that we’re magically supposed to find time for.

I’ve attempted to align committee and service assignments with teaching and research interests but have found that appointments to of the most relevant and desirable committees to me — where I feel that I could be a passionate and effective advocate at my institution, and where I am experienced — are appointed by various higher-ups to whom most new faculty (of both genders) seem to be invisible.

The upside? I’ve been forced to be creative and have developed alternative projects. For now, my plan is to keep working hard, observe, and fill up that T&P file. But you can bet your bippy that I’ll be watching committee makeup within my department and college much more closely as regards gender & work assignments. I’ll pay more attention to the conduct of my colleagues as well, particularly those of both genders who model excellent professional behavior re: their scholarly productivity.

Cautious in the mid-Atlantic, at 5:15 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

I am grateful to see research like this, and find the commentary all quite telling. The “Just Say No” advice is about as helpful to women faculty as it is to teens in a depressing, drug-saturated culture. I have never seen a faculty man’s service subjected to any kind of serious appraisal during annual evaluation or tenure/promotion deliberations. But I have seen women who chose research over service actively HAZED for doing so at tenure time. Despite a history of extensive, generous, effective service at every level from department to national field, I myself have experienced punitive admonitions at annual evaluation time to “serve more” when I was saying no to service that others could do and giving higher priority to my research. My first semester as an assistant professor in a state university, I submitted a dossier with three high-status publications, to which my senior colleagues responded that I needed to “get out into the field more,” meaning public schools. I have seen senior women faculty actively resented and made objects of quite sexist name-calling on account of their having said no to service in order to give priority to their research. I have never seen such hazing and punishment directed at faculty men who have given higher priority to research than to service, even when others were slaving away on tasks they might have helped accomplish, which might have benefited their own working conditions. However, as I approach full seniority, I am now experimenting with an apprenticeship approach to graduate schooling that teaches my students how to serve in ad hoc collective efforts as professional, scholarly activists for needed changes on campus, in the profession, and in our field, for the sake of social justice and nonviolence. This kind of service is far more educational for its participants, socially developmental for a community of learning, easier to balance and integrate organically with research and teaching, and far more rewarding than the usual service as tokens to make a committee look representative while it typically only conserves the status quo that causes our “quiet desperation.” This alternative kind of service that I am actively teaching future members of the professoriate in my field values criticism and imagination and makes innovative coalitions among faculty, students, staff, and community people to make changes we need to see happen. I am sick and tired of committee tokenism that just consumes our time to help things stay the same.

Philosopherofeducation, at 8:31 pm EDT on July 17, 2008

Not quite win-win

To respond , While in the long term, my investment in our grad program will (I hope) pay off, in the short term it has been a real burden. I lost lots of research time and my productivity dropped at a vulnerable funding time. The male colleague (peer in status) hired at the same time as I, in contrast, was protected from admin duties “for his research". The message I got from the chair was that my research is not valued. This is one big reason I have resigned as chair of the grad cte, since there was no tangible reward for all the work I did on it—no financial incentive, no teaching release, and certainly no meaningful respect. I did not join my dept to be an administrator.

So this is far from a win-win situation.

biosciprof, at 7:40 pm EDT on July 18, 2008

Sorry, biosciprof, you made it sound like your investment had yielded improvements in the quality of research assistants for your lab, so I interpreted that as a win for you and a win for your department. Didn’t mean to put words in your mouth.

Assistant Professof of Physics, at 4:00 pm EDT on July 20, 2008

I was just having this discussion the other day with a colleague at a similar career stage. I said I had too many service commitments and would be cutting back as he was doing, and he replied, “But you’re so good at it.” This took me back to the summer after high school, when I had a secretarial job. One of the other secretaries said, “I don’t know why you want to go to college — you’re such a good secretary.”

female scientist/full prof, at 9:55 am EDT on July 22, 2008

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Women, Men and Service

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Comments

Learning to say no....

Hoisted by Their Own Petard.......

Where is Chuck coming from?

Women’s work?

Shaping your service

Women play it safe because our risks are greater

Two years in and watching closely...

Not quite win-win

Jobs Related to Women, Men and Service

Instructor University of South Carolina

Adjunct Horticulture Community College of Allegheny County

Program Manager, CE, Adult & Personal Enrichment Lone Star College System

Associate/Full Professor NC State University

FT 9/11 Mo Faculty — 2025A Saint Louis University

Motorcycle Maintenance Assistant Professor 0000488 Los Rios Community College District

Faculty, Marketing and Decision Sciences, Full-Time, Tenure Track, Fall 2009 Salem State College, MA

FT 12 Mo Faculty — 2020A Saint Louis University

Adjunct Computer Information Technologies Community College of Allegheny County

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