Invisible labor and the associate professor: Identity and workload inequity.

Abstract

Many professors, especially at the associate level, say yes to service requests despite the pervasive advice to "just say no." Much of this service constitutes "invisible labor" that diverts time and energy from efforts required to advance to the full professor rank. Based on in-depth interview research with 25 tenured professors, this article outlines how different groups of faculty negotiate invisible labor, highlights institutional inequities that unevenly determine patterns of invisible labor, and connects invisible labor to broader neoliberal forces. For women faculty of color in particular, a "no" is not always respected by more powerful institutional actors, and the individualized emphasis on "just saying no" to service brings with it both individual and collective costs. This article suggests that institutional and cultural change may ameliorate the racialized and gendered inequities associated with invisible labor more effectively than the individualized advice to "just say no."

Hierarchies and paradoxes: How women in non-tenure-track faculty positions experience a gendered organization.

“…Participants were forced to double down on their roles as mothers in their work and decide between fulfilling the caring, stern, or pushover mom archetype. Previous literature in this regard focused on the caregiving quality of teaching work and reinforces our findings about the pressures participants felt to fulfill caregiving roles, yet much of this literature is focused on tenuretrack faculty (Gordon et al, 2022; Guarino & Borden, 2017; O’Meara, Kuvaeva, Nyunt, Waugaman, & Jackson, 2017). Like Docka-Filipek and Stone (2021) who described women faculty pressured to “mother the academic family” (p. 2169), our study aids in drawing clearer connections between the pressure to nurture and “mother” students for women non-tenure-track faculty, adding to literature by defining caregiving more specifically in domestic mothering roles at all levels of the professoriate and specifically in teaching activities.…”

Invisible, unmanageable, and inevitable: Online abuse as inequality in the academic workplace.

“…Operating in a context where their participation will be met with inordinately critical reception, faculty from equity-deserving groups are more likely to engage in what Sobieraj (2020) calls “credibility work,” additional labor to bullet-proof themselves against hostile and abusive behavior online. Inevitably, this is time and mental energy that faculty from equity-deserving groups must expend in excess of that of their colleagues from more privileged groups, constituting an additional form of “invisible labor” that equity-deserving faculty must do (Gordon et al, 2022; Rideau, 2021; Terosky et al, 2014).…”

“…However, this problem cannot be effectively addressed at the level of the individual (Hodson et al, 2018). Institutional changes will be required to ameliorate the inequalities it contributes to in the academy (Gordon et al, 2022; Haynes-Baratz et al, 2022; Martinez et al, 2023). Indeed, it is our position that institutions have a responsibility and an obligation to respond.…”

Consequences of the Science Reform Movement

“…Barr et al, 2019), again a time sink that is rarely captured in workload models. These issues also apply to the informal mentoring of colleagues and PhD students, work that is typically already neglected in workload models and falls disproportionately on structurally disadvantaged staff (Gordon et al, 2022). Adding in mentoring of open research skills and knowledge to existing supervision of how to navigate academia and research methods again represents additional activities that are practically time consuming, but that are not reflected in workload models.…”