William F. Buckley once famously said that he’d rather live in a country governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, but Harvard has just discovered that in at least one important respect its faculty is not as different from the rest of the country as many think.
In a recent survey of faculty satisfaction discussed this morning by Inside Higher Ed, Harvard discovered that its female faculty spend considerably more time on household chores than male faculty.
Women at the assistant and associate levels who either have a partner who works or are single spend an average of 40 hours a week on such duties. That’s twice the number of hours Harvard men in the same circumstances spend. Full professors (who would be likely to have older children) have the same proportional gap. Women who either have a partner who works or are single report spending 20 hours a week on the household, child care or adult care — while men report spending 10 hours.
Even the distaff faculty with partners who do not work disproportionately do the chores: “at the associate and assistant level, it appears that the working Harvard female spouse has more home duties than her male counterpart — 17 hours more a week in fact.”
Harvard should not leave this chauvinistic inequity unchallenged, but what can it do? As it happens, I have a modest proposal. It should include “contributions to gender equity” among its criteria used to evaluate candidates for tenure, promotion, and salary increases.
Some may regard it as intrusive or ideologically overbearing to count the hours taking out the garbage as a relevant criterion of academic success, but such skeptics can be readily dismissed since they are probably conservatives or even Republicans. Surely no progressive campus citizens, i.e., everyone else, could argue that gender equity is less important than “diversity,” and and calls for “contributions to diversity” to be taken into account are increasingly common — see, for example, the National Institutes of Health, the University of California, the University of Washington, the University of Missouri, and Virginia Tech (for more on Virgina Tech, see here).
This taking account of contributions to gender equity need not be limited to mindlessly quantitative lists of hours doing this and that. It could also include mindlessly qualitative reporting of time spent doing non-traditional chores, such as women taking out the garbage and men doing cooking or decorating. Care will have to be taken, of course, to make sure that same sex couples are not put at a disadvantage for any difficulty they may have earning recognition by performing non-traditional tasks at home when it may not yet be clear what is traditional for same-sex couples. Perhaps their simple existence as same sex couples should be regarded as a sufficient contribution to gender equity, although that would no doubt be regarded by those skeptics mentioned above as discriminatory preferential treatment.
But even with some wrinkles to be worked out, the criteria that should count as contributions to gender equity are at least as clear and objective as the increasingly accepted criteria for determining “contributing to diversity.”
