Housework Is an Academic Issue
How to keep talented women scientists in the lab, where they belong.
By Londa Schiebinger and Shannon K. Gilmartin
Scientists are likely not to be interested in
thinking about housework. Since René Descartes, Western culture has
stringently separated matters of mind from body. Housework is, however,
related to the life of the mind. Scientists wear clean clothes to the
lab (at least from time to time), eat food procured and prepared by
someone, and live in reasonably clean houses. This labor used to be
done by stay-athome wives. The single-earner wage of the 1950s, for
example, covered the cost of unpaid services that wives performed. Now,
housework is often done by wives and partners who are also full-time
professionals—and the women we discuss in this study are scientists at
thirteen of the top research universities in the United States.
Findings from our study, based on data collected in 2006–07, show
that despite women’s considerable gains in science in recent decades,
female scientists do nearly twice as much housework as their male
counterparts. Partnered women scientists at places like Stanford
University do 54 percent of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry in their
households; partnered men scientists do just 28 percent. This
translates to more than ten hours a week for women— in addition to the
nearly sixty hours a week they are already working as scientists—and to
just five hours for men. When the call came from Stockholm early one
October morning, Nobel Prize– winner Carol W. Greider was not working
in her lab or sleeping. She was doing laundry. She is far from alone.
Highly talented women scientists are investing substantial time in
housework.
These findings have important policy implications. Over the past
three decades, governments, universities, and industries have dedicated
often robust resources to efforts to increase the number of women
scientists—and yet progress in attracting more women to science has
stalled. The 2009 National Academies report Gender Differences at Critical Transitions
stresses that research must explore “gender differences in the
obligations outside of professional responsibilities” in order to
understand women’s career choices and outcomes more fully.
In this study, we zero in on the obligation of household labor. We
analyze the division of household labor in scientists’ homes and their
strategies to lighten the household load in order to maintain highly
productive careers. We argue that work done in the home is very much an
academic issue—not peripheral in any way to scientists’ professional
lives. Understanding how housework relates to women’s careers is one
new piece in the puzzle of how to attract more women to science.
Our policy recommendation provides a new solution to one key aspect
of balancing life and work. We propose that employers provide benefits
to support housework. Many universities already offer retirement,
health-care, and child-care supplements; some even support housing and
tuition benefits. We recommend that institutions provide a package of
flexible benefits that employees can customize to support aspects of
their private lives in ways that save time and enhance professional
productivity. Institutions need to think of housework benefits as part
of the structural cost of doing business. With lab costs running into
the millions of dollars, supporting the human resource
involved—scientists’ ability to be more productive—takes full advantage
of investments in space and equipment.
This policy recommendation hinges on the principle that outsourced
household labor must be professionalized responsibly— with competitive
wages and health-care, family-care, and retirement benefits—and that
employers must conduct due diligence on the household service providers
with whom they contract. As political scientists John Bowman and Alyson
Cole have noted in a recent article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
“Do Working Mothers Oppress Other Women?” employing others to perform
housework is subject to much political, legal, and sociological debate,
even in gender-progressive countries like Sweden. “Rather than blaming
women who hire housecleaners,” they write, “progressives should aim
instead at elevating the status of this labor.” They argue that
commodifying household labor helps to reduce illegal employment in
domestic services and create real, properly compensated jobs; it also
helps to end working women’s double shifts and advance gender equality
in the home.
But current cultural struggles about who exactly should be doing the
housework go well beyond concerns about equality for women. The United
States faces global competition in science, while at the same time
highly trained women scientists at top research universities invest
talent, time, and energy managing households. Is this a use of
resources that we can afford? Are there ways that universities might
better capture the talents of women scientists for science?
Who Does What?
This article draws on the rich data collected in the Managing
Academic Careers Survey, administered by Stanford University’s Michelle
R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research to full-time faculty at
thirteen leading research universities across the United States. Our
larger report, Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know,
provides details about sampling and survey methodology. Here, we focus
on the 1,222 tenured and tenure-track faculty respondents in the
natural sciences who indicated that they are partnered with someone of
the other sex (910 men and 312 women). While we collected data for
same-sex couples, the number of scientists with samesex partners is too
small for extensive quantitative analysis. Previous literature suggests
that same-sex couples may have more egalitarian divisions of labor
relative to their heterosexual peers; this topic, along with issues of
household labor for faculty members who are single, is worthy of future
research.
Among several survey items relating to partnerships and households,
respondents were asked to report their percent share, their partner’s
percent share, and “paid help/other’s” percent share of seven household
tasks, parenting, and elder care. Findings indicate that scientists’
homes reflect a traditional division of domestic labor. Women
scientists at elite research universities, like most women across the
United States, continue to do the lion’s share of housework (figure 1).
Their share of core household tasks (defined as cooking and grocery
shopping, laundry, and housecleaning) is almost double that of men
scientists (54 percent versus 28 percent). These tasks exhaust nearly
twenty hours a week (as compared with four to five hours a week for
more periodic tasks like yard and car care, house repair, and
finances), meaning that women take on a significantly larger share of
the most time-intensive jobs.1 Men and women also employ others to help
with household labor, a point to which we return below.
We examined variations in household labor by partner’s employment status (figure 2).
It comes as no surprise that men scientists with stay-at-home partners
do the least core household labor in our study. It is part of the
current social contract that stay-at-home wives do the majority (76
percent) of core domestic work. Only thirteen women scientists in our
sample have a stay-at-home partner; while these women take on
proportionately less work than their partners, they still assume a
greater share of core tasks than do most men scientists.
Does the division of household labor vary between academic couples
(where both partners are academics—and in this sample at least one is a
scientist) and other dual-career couples (where one partner is a
scientist and one is employed outside the home)? We found few
differences between these households. In the main, the woman does
substantially more work than her male partner, regardless of the type
of couple.
Interestingly, men scientists with academic partners have found
their way into the kitchen and currently take on 41 percent of cooking
and grocery shopping (figure 2). Academic couples have among the more
equitable divisions of cooking labor across all groups. Men scientists
with employed, nonacademic partners do only 33 percent of their
household cooking, whereas women scientists in those relationships do
61 percent.
While still not taking on a full half of cooking responsibilities,
men contribute significantly more here than they do to other core
housework tasks. This is important because cooking and its attendant
duties are estimated to consume about nine hours a week—and up,
depending on the demands of gourmet palates.
Women also assume a disproportionate share of child and elder care.
In our sample, women scientists do 54 percent of parenting labor in
their households, and men scientists do 36 percent (“parenting labor”
refers to physical, psychosocial, and intellectual responsibilities).
The extra hours women put in have real consequences for their careers.
As Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden have shown in their much cited 2002 Academe
article, “Do Babies Matter?” women who have children within five years
of receiving their doctorate are less likely to achieve tenure than are
men with “early babies.”
Generational Patterns
What about generational issues? Are young men doing more household
work? Our data show little generational variation. Across all ranks,
women scientists in dual-career couples perform more core housework
than do similarly situated men scientists (figure 3).
Men assistant professors take on significantly more core housework than
do men full professors (35 percent versus 28 percent), but this still
falls well below that of their female partners (at 59 percent, with the
4 percent balance for these couples assigned to “paid help/other”). The
persistence of these gender differences across rank is consistent with
research showing that girls do more housework than boys even at a very
young age.
Professional Hours Worked
The issue of domestic labor is directly related to the question of
how many hours people work professionally. In our survey, we asked an
“hours worked” question in part to test former Harvard University
president Lawrence H. Summers’s notion that “high powered” faculty work
professionally eighty hours a week. We asked, “How many hours per week
on average do you work?” recognizing that at times people have push
periods where they may work eleven to fifteen hours a day.
Our findings show that very few scientists—thirty-four men and
eighteen women (4 percent of our sample)— work the Summers
eighty-plus-hour week (figure 4).
People who work eighty hours a week are on the job 11.4 hours a day,
seven days a week (hours are self-reported). One wonders about the
potential to sustain these schedules over a professional lifetime.
Partnered science faculty in our sample average nearly sixty hours a
week at work. Men and women scientists log the same number of hours
(mean hours for men is 56.4, mean for women 56.3, and standard
deviations—about 11—are the same as well). Up to sixty hours of
concentrated work a week (and not just hours spent away from home) over
the long haul requires tremendous commitment. And as one senior chemist
in our survey remarked, working long hours does not necessarily foster
creativity.
Hiring Household Help
Our study also reveals an important strategy women deploy to manage
household labor and remain scientifically productive: “outsourcing,” or
employing others to help with this work. At each rank, women scientists
outsource twice as much core housework as do men scientists (figure 3).
Despite significantly lower salaries, women assistant professors
outsource the same proportion of housework as men full professors.
Senior-ranking women outsource 20 percent of their basic housework. For
these women, employing others to assist with housework does not
equalize divisions of labor, but it does somewhat lighten their share,
and it shaves off almost four hours from the total weekly household
load. Housecleaning is subcontracted to third parties more than any
other core household task (figure 1).
Interestingly, our data suggest that employing others to help with
core housework is characteristic of highly productive science faculty
(where productivity is defined as total self-reported number of
published articles over one’s career) even after rank, gender, salary,
and one’s own share of labor are controlled (analysis was limited to
scientists in dual-career partnerships). This is true for both women
and men—we often find that practices that are good for women’s careers
also assist men in reaching their career goals.
Nearly sixty-hour workweeks, combined with a disproportionate share
of household labor and child care, make young women think twice about
careers in academic science. As Mason and Goulden put it in their 2004 Academe
article, “Do Babies Matter? (Part II),” “this model is not very
attractive for women who hope to succeed in academia.” Indeed, their
recent research indicates that women PhDs turn away from academic
science because they face a culture that precludes time and
responsibility for home, family, and life. Considering the cost of
training PhD scientists, this is an expensive proposition for science
and society.
The Stalled Revolution
U.S. society has witnessed “half of a revolution” with respect to
women. Women have entered the workforce in large numbers; they have
entered the sciences, become university professors, deans, and
presidents—this latter in rather astonishing proportions (half of the
presidents of Ivy League universities currently are women). The public
world is changing, pushed forward by legislation and institutional
action. The private world of the home, however, remains largely mired
in tradition. In The Mind Has No Sex? Londa Schiebinger has
documented how the workplace separated and became distinct from the
domestic sphere in Western societies only about two hundred years ago
and how this separation undergirded the exclusion of women from modern
universities and professional life more generally. These divides are
historical and can be changed.
For more than forty years, women in the United States have struggled
to create equality in the home. Women’s strategy has been to get men to
assume their responsibilities and do their fair share. Some, like the
sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1975 Second Shift, argue
the need for men’s participation in terms of equality of burdens and
responsibilities. Others, like Sharon Meers and Joanne Strober in their
2009 Getting to 50/50, argue for this in terms of the
pleasure of full participation in private life. And nationally, men are
doing more. Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson, and Melissa Wilkie have
shown in their 2006 Changing Rhythms of American Family Life
that almost 70 percent of married fathers today report doing housework,
versus 54.4 percent in 1965; married men now take on 33.3 percent of
household labor, versus 11.3 percent in the 1960s.
But men are still not taking their full share of responsibility. Our
larger study of the U.S. academic workforce reveals one reason why.
While men professors in our crossdiscipline sample (that is, faculty
overall, not just scientists) report giving personal goals priority
over professional ones at a slightly higher rate than women (22 percent
versus 19 percent), they also report giving their own careers higher
priority than those of their partners. In response to the survey
question, “In your relationship, whose career is considered primary?”
half of men in academic couples marked “mine,” compared with only 20
percent of women. The majority of women marked that each partner’s
career is “equal” (59 percent versus 45 percent of men). Economist
Robert Drago and higher education specialist Carol Colbeck’s “The
Mapping Project: Exploring the Terrain of U.S. Colleges and
Universities for Faculty and Families” shows that when men value their
careers over their partners’, women academics tend to comply, all too
often recalibrating their career goals to facilitate those of their
husbands.
What Institutions Can Do
Universities have developed over the past two hundred years to fit
men’s lives, both as faculty members and as students. From the
nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, university professors were
predominantly men—with stay-at-home wives who organized and cared for
the household. As women have entered universities, in large numbers
since the 1970s, both as students and as faculty members, universities
are slowly being remade also to fit women’s lives. Many reforms have
focused, for example, on policies for family leave, stopping the tenure
clock, providing child care, and the like. These measures, however,
remain insufficient.
Our policy recommendation provides a solution to one key aspect of
balancing work and life. We propose that institutions extend their
current benefits program to support assistance with household labor.
Few universities to date have looked at reforms related to housework.
U.S. employers tend to provide specific benefits for health care, day
care, and sometimes even housing and college tuition. We recommend that
institutions offer instead a “cafeteria” or “flexstyle” benefits plan
from which employees could tailor a package to meet their particular
needs (retirement benefits should remain as they are now, fixed and not
optional).
Employee needs can change over the course of a lifetime. Younger
people, for example, may need assistance with household labor when
salaries are low. Those who have children may choose to put resources
into child care and later into college tuition. Some employees may need
help with elder care. A flexible benefits package—providing a specific
yearly dollar amount—could be used for any aspect of private life that
saves employee time and hence enhances productivity. One appealing
aspect of this benefit proposal is its inclusivity—one need not be
partnered or have children to gain access to the full range of services
under its umbrella.
To our knowledge, U.S. employers generally do not provide a benefit
to assist with housework. Some non-U.S. companies, such as Sony
Ericsson in Sweden, do. There, the company pays for housecleaning from
select service providers. The Swedish government is currently
experimenting with tax relief on domestic services, believing that,
despite initial costs, Sweden will benefit in the long run by creating
new jobs and reducing illegal employment and exploitation in services
for cleaning, gardening, and cooking. In the United States, the effort
to provide benefits for domestic labor revalues housework that has
never been represented in the nation’s gross domestic product.
Housework has been invisible labor carried out by women behind closed
doors and often in the wee hours of the morning. This work needs to be
lifted out of the private sphere of the family and put onto the
national grid. The United States needs to capture the talents of its
female scientific workforce for science.
Given the recent economic downturn, we understand that this may not
be the right time to argue for expanding employee benefits. Our
proposal, however, addresses longterm problems and long-term solutions.
Providing benefits to support housework continues dominant social
trends of the past forty years: U.S. institutions have stepped into the
domestic sphere to support aspects of private life, from health-care
benefits to child-care supplements. Institutions now need to step in to
support housework.
Note
We thank Shelley Correll, Paula England, Patricia Jones, Dan Ryan,
and Myra Strober for their comments on this essay. We thank the
Michelle R. Clayman Institute at Stanford University for funding for
this project.
1. Household hour estimates for this study are derived from Mary
Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, “Do Babies Matter (Part II)? Closing the
Baby Gap,” Academe 90 (November–December 2004): 10–15; and the 2007
American Time Use Survey (http://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1_2007.pdf).
Using Mason and Goulden’s data, we calculate that a two-person academic
household devotes approximately twenty-four hours a week to housework.
Seven household tasks in our “Managing Academic Careers” survey (see
figure 1) are then distributed across these twenty-four hours; tasks
were roughly weighted according to American Time Use Survey daily
estimates for each.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of
Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Michelle R. Clayman
Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Her most recent
book is Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering. Her
e-mail address is schiebinger@stanford.edu. Shannon K. Gilmartin is
director of SKG Analysis and a quantitative analyst for the Clayman
Institute. Her research focuses on education and workforce development
in science and engineering fields. Her e-mail address is
sgilmartin@skganalysis.com
Comment on this article by writing to academe@aaup.org.
Note: Comments are reviewed prior to posting and will not appear on this page immediately.
Comments:
Dear Editor:
I just finished the interesting article on housework, women, and
science by Londa Schiebinger and Shannon K. Gilmartin. As a
female junior faculty member at a research university, I am surprised
to find my situation not represented in that article at all. I am
a single parent (divorced). I do all the housework--100%,
and earn all the income for my family--again 100%. I have two
pre-teens, one still in afterschool care. That means I can't
afford household help.
I didn't see single, custodial parents noted in the article at all.
I am the only one I know in my department. If there are others at
my university, I have yet to meet them. Certainly, I can't be the
only one in the country.
Can I?
I hope Drs. Schiebinger and Gilmartin will consider others like me
in their next article. Even if it's only to note our absence.
K. K.
Dear Editor,
As a psychoanalyst who has worked
extensively on the conlficts women experience when they balance work
outside the home and work as a mother, I read "Housework is an academic
issue" with great interest.
The article omits discussion
of a very important issue: the difference between men and women towards
rearing children and by extension taking care of their families and
household. As a result of this difference, there is much greater
ambivalence among women than men when it comes to making choices
between housework and academic work.
In addition to
concrete help such as the "cafeteria menu" proposed in the article,
helping mothers accept their ambivalences and cope with the resultant
stresses can go a long way to help propel the academic careers of
mothers.
L.H.
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