The "service work" imbalance

Imagine you're sitting at a computer with a button you can click. You're in a room full of other people who are also participating in this experiment. You've been randomly placed in a group with two other people, though you don't know which two.

If, at the end of a two minute timer, none of you have clicked your button, all three of you earn $1. But if someone clicks the button, the round immediately ends, that person earns $1.25, and the other two group members earn $2.

There are 10 rounds. Nobody knows who volunteered in which round.

What would you do?

When researchers ran this experimental game of chicken, they found that in mixed-gender cohorts, women volunteered 3.4 out of 10 times on average, while men volunteered only 2.3 out of 10 times. In contrast, when the group of people in the room was single-gender, everyone volunteered about 2.7 times out of 10.¹

The researchers concluded that in mixed-gender groups, women are more willing to volunteer to do tasks that incur a cost to themselves, and men are more likely to hope someone else (perhaps a woman) will do it. This wasn't because the women were better at the task or enjoyed it more, nor was it because women were nicer and more altruistic: in single-gender groups, women and men volunteered at the same rates! So what's going on?

This experiment was conducted by the authors of The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. These four successful women started a "No Club" because they kept finding themselves agreeing to take on work tasks that someone needed to do but that did not benefit their careers. Together, they slowly got better at saying "no" to these non-promotable tasks (NPTs). This made their workloads more manageable and gave them more time for promotable (i.e., career-benefitting) work. But then they noticed that the NPTs they turned down were just being taken on by other female colleagues instead.

When they began to conduct studies and interviews on the question, they found that women were doing more than their fair share of NPTs across industries ranging from academia to law firms to the TSA to bartending. Women were likelier to volunteer or to be asked to do these tasks, and once asked, women were likelier than men to say yes.²

One study of a consulting firm's records on their employees' billable hours found that women spent about 200 hours more per year than men on non-promotable work! For women in more junior roles, this time ate into their time spent on promotable work; for senior women, it was on top of their promotable work. The senior women were simply doing more work in total than senior men—perhaps they realized they had to in order to get where they are!

One of The No Club’s authors, economics professor Linda Babcock, gives a personal example, comparing her schedule on a non-teaching day to that of a male colleague. Hers looked like:

8:30-10:30 IRB meeting

10:30-12 curriculum review meeting

12-1:30 student presentation

1:30-2 interview with reporter

2-3 executive education meeting

3-4 research

4-5 prepare talk for womens' group

5-6 faculty meeting

His looked like:

8:30-12 research

12-1:30 student presentation

1:30-5 research

5-6 faculty meeting

He had time for 6 more hours of research. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.  

In the fall semester of last year, I remember apologetically telling a fellow graduate student I couldn't co-run LGBTQ math socials with her. I was doing too much of this sort of thing already: Math Includes, Real Representations, Girls' Angle, DRP, WiSTEM, and being a GSC rep. When I listed them all, I realized it might be wise to cut down on these things in the spring semester. In retrospect, I mostly failed to do this.

Last month, I was asked for the first time to review a paper for a TCS³ conference. I agreed, of course: reviewing papers is a service to the community, and for me it's also a new skill to develop. Coincidentally, less than a week later, I was asked again by someone else to review a different paper. Now I was torn. I felt bad saying no, but I was busy and I knew it would take away from my research time. Eventually, I clicked on the paper to glean some hint of how time-consuming it would be to review. I promptly saw that my PhD advisor was one of the authors, upon which I breathed a sigh of relief and informed the requester that I had to say no due to a conflict of interest.

The replication crisis has taught me to take all social science studies with a grain of salt. But I can certainly say this stuff comes up in my own life. There's a name for NPTs in academia, and it’s "service work," and I do a lot of it. And I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this is correlated with my gender.

So what do we do about this?

Naturally, we should change the current norms and expectations so that we no longer expect women to take on service work at higher rates than men. Individual women can volunteer less and be more willing to say "no" when asked to take on an excess of service work. And everyone—especially people in positions of authority—can consciously strive to be gender-balanced in who they ask to do service work, to fight back against subconscious biases toward asking women.

There is however a complication: sometimes you do specifically need women⁴ for a particular role. For example, on a faculty committee focusing on diversity and inclusivity, you obviously want representation of perspectives from underrepresented groups. For a math mentorship program for women, you want female mentors to serve as role models. And so on.

I think the trick is to pay attention to when a woman is actually needed for the role, and when a man would do. Don't do what a university referenced in The No Club did—they bragged that their faculty committees were all 50% women, despite only a quarter of faculty being women! Although this practice was well-intentioned, it meant female faculty had to spend a lot more of their time on committee-related service work, while men were comparatively off the hook. They would have done well to think carefully about which committees needed gender parity most.

Finally, departments can make service work promotable, or at least less non-promotable, by counting mentorship and service as an important factor when choosing candidates to hire or promote. This was on my mind last year when I was asked to serve on the grad student interview committee for new faculty candidates (another NPT, I now realize, ha!). We grad students were there to judge whether the candidates would be good teachers and PhD advisors, but I made sure to ask each candidate a question about what they were doing to support diversity in math. I'm not sure if my initiative-taking actually affected anything—optimistically, one hopes that these questions about service are included elsewhere in the interview process. But I'm not privy to the rest of the process, so who knows.

Reader, how about you? What is the gender balance of service work in your department or office? And what can you do about it?

Thanks to Rebecca Giblon, Holden Lee, and Dennis Yi for feedback on a draft of this post.

1 Multiplying this by three, you can see that there were some rounds in which no one volunteered. ^↩

2 The authors acknowledged as a limitation of their research that their studies focused only on men and women; more research is needed to understand how those outside the gender binary fit into all this. ^↩

3 Theoretical computer science. ^↩

4 Or other underrepresented groups—my focus here is on gender, but I expect this part is more broadly applicable. ^↩

Closing the Gender Gap

I have been the only female student in a math class at Princeton, not once but twice. These weren’t unusually small classes: one had ten students, the other fourteen. I’ve taken math classes with eight professors, of whom one was female.

This is all par for the course in the Princeton Math Department.

We’ve come a long way since the days when women were first being admitted to the university and the math building (so I’ve heard) had no women’s restrooms. Equal treatment is the expectation; the department chair, David Gabai, has assured me that he is “committed to have the Math Department be a welcoming place where students and faculty are treated respectfully, fairly and professionally.” His view is shared by all the other faculty I’ve spoken to about this.

Nonetheless, we’ve definitely got a ways to go. The proportion of female students and faculty remains pretty low, both at Princeton and comparable universities. The 2018 class of math majors were 1/3 women, a department all-time record. In my year, the fraction is 1/5.

What causes this gender gap?

There isn’t one single answer to this question, of course. But one of the biggest factors -- and one that isn’t often discussed -- is underconfidence.

Math has a pernicious reputation for being accessible only to geniuses. If you're a student in a challenging math class, it is easy to get intimidated and think, "Man, this is really hard, I must not be smart enough."

It is especially easy to fall victim to this genius myth at places like Princeton, where some students enter already having a background in proof-based math. Freshmen who do not have this background may compare themselves to the ones that do, and ascribe the difference to talent instead of to a temporary head start.

Underconfidence doesn't exclusively afflict women. However, research has found that it does so disproportionately: on average, women consider themselves lower-performing than men at the same performance level. This lines up with my experience. I have heard from more than a few female math majors -- no less talented than their male counterparts -- who at some point doubted their ability to succeed in math. I also know of two female students in my year who would have liked to major in math, but didn't because they didn't believe they were smart enough.

To close the gender gap, we have to close the confidence gap. We need supportive mentors and female role models for the younger students. We need female math majors and grad students and professors to talk to freshmen, and say, "I've struggled too. Everyone does. It's not just you."

Accomplishing this is hard! If it weren’t, everybody probably would have done it already.

But I’m part of the undergraduate Noetherian Ring at Princeton, and we’re doing what we can -- and now I’ll describe what exactly it is that we’re doing, in the hope that our ideas are useful to other people who care about this issue.

A year ago, math major Aria Wong spearheaded an initiative to encourage more women to major in math. She made a website with resources and advice from older students, and she sent personal welcome emails to every single one of the dozens of incoming freshman women who indicated an interest in math on their applications.

On top of that, Aria held a dinner for freshman women interested in majoring in math. She especially encouraged students who weren't sure about it to come to the dinner. She invited all the female junior and senior math majors, along with a handful of grad students and professors; we were there to give advice and answer questions for the freshmen. At one point during the dinner, we all went around one by one and talked about our experiences: the struggles we'd faced, the friends we'd found in the department who had helped us through. Two of the then-seniors, who became friends during their first proof-based math class, said they would not have gotten through that class without each other. (They’re both now getting PhDs at top-15 math grad schools.)

In Fall 2018, inspired by Aria, I started organizing weekly study sessions for female math students. These are designed to be casual: we just chat and work on homework. These study sessions give younger female students a way to meet juniors and seniors, who can serve as an academic resource and a source of encouragement. Honestly, I think all of us -- older students too -- benefit from having a better support network. The department is helping out with these study sessions by funding a surefire method of attracting students, namely free food.

The Noetherian Ring also started holding once-a-semester dinners around course selection time, where students give and receive advice about choosing courses, applying to summer research programs and internships, applying to graduate school, and so on. This semester, the Noetherian Ring and the Math Club jointly hosted a play on issues of gender and race in math, and afterwards held a dinner discussion with the playwright.

What else could we do? We could add a "Women and Minorities" page to the Math Department website, with links to websites of groups supporting women and under-represented minorities in math, both within and without Princeton. Perhaps this webpage could also include profiles of female professors or grad students, along with their advice to young female math students. We could host a once-a-semester math lecture by a female mathematician, perhaps followed by a dinner discussion in which she talks about her experience and advice with gender issues. We could have free one-on-one coffee chats between volunteer mentors and younger female students. We could also work on advocating and designing more academic support for students in the introductory proof sequences, MAT 215-217 and 216-218.

It is too soon to tell how successful our efforts will be at encouraging more female math majors. But with serious thought and persistent effort, I believe we can bring about a time when, if the gender ratio in a graduating class of math majors is 1/3, then that’s a local minimum -- not a global maximum.




For more guidance on supporting female students, see the "Guidelines on Best Practices" published by an NSF-funded initiative called WATCH US: https://www.womendomath.org/watch-us/