Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, recently printed this article detailing the large difference in the amount of time male and female faculty members spend on service activities. Service activities include tasks like serving on committees (search committees, seminar speaker invitation committees, curriculum revision committees, etc.), mentoring, and teaching. Studies have repeatedly shown that female professors are more likely to be involved in such service activities. In the long run, this hurts their careers because at large research institutions research is the most important criterion for achieving tenure and receiving timely promotions. The article suggests a couple of strategies to solve the problem, each of which would have the end goal of making women faculty more aware of how service tasks affect their careers and what exactly they should be doing to gain tenure and promotions. Perhaps a more appropriate solution would be for tenure and promotion decisions to give more credit to faculty members contributing to service tasks, without which academic departments would be in a sorry state.
