Gender, household labor, and scholarly productivity among university professors

In the present paper, we use data collected from 673 faculty members at one research university to describe the division of household labor among academics and explore the relationship between household labor and scholarly productivity. The analyses demonstrate that domestic labor is distributed along relatively traditional lines among academics, reflecting the continued traditionalism found in the general population regarding house-hold labor and child care. Women college-professors shoulder considerably more house-hold labor than do their male colleagues—particularly when they are married and when there are children in the home. We hypothesized that the gender discrepancies in house-hold labor we found would translate into differences in scholarly productivity; however, this was the case only among tenure-track faculty with children in the home. This work was completed while the authors were supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (RO1 AG18869-01, Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer, Principal Investigators). The data collection was funded by the Louisiana State University Commission on the Status of Women.