White male college professors do the least service and mentoring, yet get promoted fastest. (X)
h/t GinaSue
What shocking news.
Let me add that there’s an extra-insidious layer to a lot of this service work, beyond the usual “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” double-bind of department service. If you’re a woman or a POC, you may well be asked to serve on this or that committee, help with this or that student group, do structured mentoring activities above and beyond what’s asked of your white, male peers in the name of diversity. Some of it’s pure tokenism – “Our hiring committee wasn’t biased, there were two whole women on it, and one of them is black!” But other times, it’s a genuinely well-intended attempt to get someone who’s not another white dude involved in the day-to-day to running of the department/college/university.
(And there’s a particularly painful situation with mentoring, where you might want so bad to help as many of the students as possible who are now where you were ten years ago–you want to be a role model, you want to provide a leg up–but there’s only so many hours in the day.)
But then, of course, come tenure time, that mountain of service to the department doesn’t mean as much as your academic output–papers published, articles in print, conference talks–and, surprise, you don’t have as much as Prof. Whiteguy down the hall because you were busier with all those committees and panels and mentoring meetings. But if you didn’t do those things, there might not be anyone other than the Prof. Whiteguys doing them, and we know the shitty effect that has on hiring, retention, campus culture in general.
So one top of the general pattern of expecting women (and also MoC) to do more service work and then penalizing them for it, there’s the added layer that sometimes you actually want to do that work in order to make changes in your institution or field–making it extra hard to say no to yet another demand on your time.
