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Professor Joya Misra (sociology and public policy) is one of seven scholars around the country working on a new $750,000 National Science Foundation project that will examine whether men and women university faculty have dramatically different workloads and, if so, what accounts for those differences and how they can be minimized.
Over the next five years Misra and the other researchers involved with the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project will study 42 departments in 13 public institutions in Maryland, Massachusetts and North Carolina. Misra will serve as team leader for research on universities located in Massachusetts. The team will monitor not only how faculty members’ responsibilities are distributed, but also how those same people rate metrics like job satisfaction and organizational commitment. This project is the first of its kind to examine the underlying causes of inequality in faculty workload.
Misra has long studied gender issues and work-life balance in higher education. She and co-author Jennifer Lundquist write for Inside Higher Ed about the challenges midcareer faculty face, including women faculty who are trying to earn full professor status.
In a recent essay, for example, Misra and Lundquist write, “Unlike men, women sacrificed research time in order to meet their institutions’ high demands for teaching, mentoring and university service.… Women voiced frustration that they could not spend more time on their research. While excellent career advice abounds to ‘just say no,’ the faculty we interviewed reported feeling responsible to their colleagues and students.”
This trend results in fewer women than men becoming full professors, which in turn results in women faculty earning less money than men with comparable years of experience.
“The Faculty Workload and Rewards Project has the potential to make long-term shifts possible through structural change in workload assignments and accountability, and cultural changes in transparency and bias regarding those assignments,” says project lead Kerry Ann O’Meara, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland.
The remaining scholars involved with the project are Elizabeth Beise, associate provost for academic planning and programs and a professor of physics at the University of Maryland; Joann Boughman, vice chancellor for academic affairs for the University of Maryland system; Karrie Dixon, vice president for academic and student affairs at the University of North Carolina General Administration; Audrey Jaeger, professor of higher education at North Carolina State University; and John Saltmarsh, professor of higher education at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.
