The Gender Gap on Service

For years, women in academe have complained that they are assigned a disproportionate share of departmental service duties — work that needs to be done but that doesn’t carry much weight when it’s time to decide who gets promoted.

A study on the issue — by Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Dahlberg Holmes and Stephanie Agiomavritis — is being released today in Academe. It explores the subject through surveys of and interviews with 350 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2008-9 — and finds significant gender gaps in service assignments and advancement of male and female professors. The study examines patterns related to specific service duties as well as allocation of time.