Lauren

Lauren is an associate professor of African-American and 20th century U.S. history, as well as the mother of an elementary school age daughter. Her professional life revolves around teaching, scholarship, and service – to her university, to her department, to her profession. She says she didn’t realize how much prepping for class and grading would bleed over into her family time. Add to that the largely invisible work of a mom’s mental labor: organizing playdates, doctor’s appointments, speech therapy, and Lauren feels she is always wearing too many hats.

Women in academia give, on average, 30-31 more hours of service per year than their male colleagues. ¹ Additionally, female professors often serve as caregivers for students and there is an expectation that women professors will be more nurturing (or, indeed, their performance reviews suffer). Lauren notes that almost every Latinx student at her university comes to her when they need advice. Those hours of unmeasured and undervalued labor are not reflected in, for example, the dismal 3-4% of tenured professors who are Black women. ²

Lauren’s paid labor hours are brown and gold “books” and her unpaid labor hours are white and silver “books,” lined up shelf after shelf. The spaces on the shelves represent the waking hours when Lauren was not working. As a nod to the many roles Lauren plays, the paid labor elements are standard academic book sizes, while the unpaid labor elements are standard children’s book sizes.

¹ Guarino & Borden, Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family? (2016) 
² CUPA-HR, Faculty Pay and Representation Report (2023)