Tags
feminism, gender, invisible labour, men, second shift, university, wife work, women
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of “wifework”, the term Susan Maushart uses for the hidden work expected of women in romantic relationships. Though her book is specifically about marriage, it connects to broader ideas about “affective labour” and “invisible work” which women carry out without acknowledgement. As the new university year approaches, I wanted to sketch a few ways in which this extra burden of work can be seen within university life, and ask for people’s own experiences.
Looking back at my own undergraduate days, it often seemed to fall to women to do the social maintenance within friendship groups. Remembering people’s birthdays, organising parties, ensuring that people weren’t left out, looking up whether there were tickets available for the play we’d said we wanted to see – these are the sort of things I’m thinking about. Of course it wasn’t always done by the women in the group, and some never did it, but I have a distinct feeling that these sorts of tasks tended to be taken care of by women.
The reason why I suspect that is I have a memory of them just sort of happening. And having booked theatre tickets and sent birthday cards since, I am aware that these things do not simply generate themselves spontaneously. From organising an end-of-term dinner to sending platonic chocolates to housemates on Valentine’s day, there are various nice things which my younger self was pleased to see, but which wouldn’t have occurred to me to plan or arrange.
This social maintenance blurs into the kind of emotional activity which has been described as “affective labour”. When someone became ill, someone turned up with painkillers and fruit juice, and that second someone was very often female. When there was a break-up, the person organising the commiseratory cocktails/ cookie dough session tended to be a woman. When someone had been having a lousy few weeks and there were discreet conversations going on about whether they needed some help…those were often happening between women.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that men didn’t do any of these things. Nor that all the women rushed round feeling that they had to tend to other people’s wellbeing instead of attending to their own art/ drama/ sport/ alcohol/ learning activities. But I think there was a definite slant in one direction. It might be objected that men simply have different social instincts. They don’t go in for talking about their feelings, or organising table plans, or showing that they care about a friend’s relationship gone wrong. But it’s striking that those sorts of “natural differences” between men and women resulted in women doing extra work and men…not.
This is not an argument that women should stop caring about their fellow students – far from it! Given the levels of rising anxiety being reported by undergraduates, maintaining strong social networks and talking about feelings are incredibly important things at university. But it’s worth thinking about the ways in which girls are trained to take on other people’s emotional and social hassle and to perform extra work that their male peers aren’t expected to carry out. Are we educating young women in an environment where they’re expected to do part of a “second shift”, in Arlie Hochschild’s term, which involves maintaining the social and emotional world which everyone benefits from?
I wonder how this also affects women in the faculty. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, I have a strong suspicion that female lecturers find themselves being asked for more affective labour than their male counterparts. More requests for the explanation of difficult ideas outside the lecture hall, more time spent talking through personal issues which are getting in the way of students’ work, more advice on careers and the world beyond study.
These are all vital parts of university life too, and personally I find pastoral work enormously rewarding. But I suspect that female academics work under the expectation that they will be more nurturing and understanding, that their time can legitimately be interrupted and put at the disposal of others. There may be an additional factor, in that female students feel – quite understandably – more able to discuss their problems and concerns with fellow women.
If we only extrapolate from stereotypes, male lecturers are allowed to be brilliant without being caring. The image of the aloof, terse, emotionally unavailable male intellectual is a role available to academic men, and they can inhabit it without social stigma. (Most, of course, have no desire to, though that’s beside the point here.) There is no equivalent image for women which carries the benefits of opting out of affective labour without the sanction of disapproval.
I’m not claiming that men don’t do any of these things, nor am I blaming individual men for the fact that we’re living in a sexist society. But I think it’d help if a lot of us looked hard at our lives in the university, and paid more attention to the unnoticed work being done by other people which makes those lives easier. Many men will have come straight from living at home to living at university, so the “wifework” done by our mothers may now be slipping into the “wifework” done by our female peers. Others will have acclimated so effectively to the unspoken rules of academic work that it genuinely never occurs to us to wonder why students tend to go to some tutors rather than others. Everyone’s working hard, so it makes sense that we’re not looking around and wondering if extra work is being done by others. But it is. I’d really like to hear people’s opinions and experiences of this.
quiteirregular 
By an odd coincicence, I found when I’d written this that there is a thread on Mumsnet feminism boards on this very subject – with v interesting comments, including about university life http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2462538-Womens-emotional-work?messages=100&pg=1
There was also a really good (but long) discussion of this sort of thing on metafilter, which makes fairly sobering reading. http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor
The example that immediately springs to mind is that, by the end of (what was then called) Freshers’ Week, every single one of my new female friends had had to explain to numerous men how the washing machines worked. Because, naturally, we were all already experts in coin-operated, top-loading washing machines *eyeroll*. But we had managed to read the instructions on the top, and had worked out that no one else was going to do our washing for us, so we’d better have a go. Perhaps the most telling part of the anecdote is that we all blamed their mothers for not teaching them.
Ha ditto. I also conducted an ironing class for three blokes all of who got quite peeved when they realised I really meant to teach them, not do the ironing for them
Haha poor menz. (I used going to university as a perfect opportunity to shake off he chains of the patriarchy re:ironing and I’ve barely done it since).
This is interesting. FWIW, a (male) colleague of mine commented recently that his female undergraduates really felt a strong peer-pressure to be emotionally supportive, whereas the men didn’t. These days there are two sides to emotional work – there’s work with colleagues and work with students.
I feel a strong peer pressure to be emotionally supportive to female colleagues, but I appreciate this because I know I get hugely more out of that support than I put into it. I’ve got a really strong female support network and I feel incredibly lucky to have it. There’s nothing that remotely compares to having people who you know will have your back and also help you with the practical side of things. *But*, I do also feel quite aware that women tend to need those networks more than men for reasons to do with the original system – eg., I’ve needed someone to talk through an exceptionally patronising bit of sexism recently; I’ve sat and listened to friends who were struggling with similar. And in my department, there’s an exceptionally strong correlation between seniority and gender, which means that I have virtually no male peers and the very senior people have no female peers, so every junior/senior mentoring relationship will inevitably be skewed.
With students, I just like teaching. I want to spend time on them if they need it. I’m not remotely interested in being hands-off. If that damages my career, my career wasn’t worth the compromise, because I’ve taught an awful lot of women (and some men, but more women) who are clearly brighter and more likely to make stellar academics than me, so I’m happy to be supporting them if I can.
PS – sorry, I fail at comment etiquette – I do feel strongly there’s an answer to all of this.
We need to teach students (and ourselves?) how to have healthy, supportive, collaborative relationships. It is part of being a professional academic, and it’s something students ought to be being taught. We don’t have a big culture of professionalisation in UK universities (as they do in the US), and it’s a problem.
We need to teach students that part of being a professional is learning how to work with other people. It is learning how to give as well as take. We need to raise the profile of this kind of emotional work and to make it very clear that you benefit from participating in supportive networks. I genuinely think that’s true – I know how valuable my support networks are, and I think they are one of the big reasons any oppressed group begins to make strides forward.
One of the really interesting things that came on the meta filter thread about emotional labour was a nuanced discussion that recognised that some of the emotional labour that women do is essential and the issue is that a) women are expected to be naturally good at this and b) are penalised for not doing it and c) so end up doing all of it. But some of it is possibly ‘make-work’ that women end up doing because looking like you’re emotionally supportive and intelligent and caring is such a big part of being a ‘good woman’.
Your points about forming relationships and supportive networks and being a good teacher would all seem to fall into the first category for me – those are important things that should be recognised in professional environments.
I work in student support, which is very heavily skewed female for no reason I can see other than this one, i.e. the assumption that women are better at jobs with an affective component.
A colleague and I recently delivered a workshop to professional services (i.e. non-academic) staff in our faculty on drawing boundaries around student support and as part of the prep for it we asked HR for a gender breakdown of this staff group – roughly 2:1 female to male.
Staff earning generally lower salaries than academics are more often female, and staff who work in non-managerial professional posts (i.e. receptionists, clerical assistants, course secretaries and administrators, &c) often tend to be on the ‘front-line’ for serious student issues and therefore become expected to act as a source of pastoral advice and guidance for students.
Academics at my institution act as personal tutors, which has a pastoral element, and many of the ones I work with do it really well. But it’s not difficult for personal tutors to make themselves uninviting while obeying the letter if not the spirit of the university’s guidance on what the role means.
The problem of women academics experiencing sexist assumptions about their role is very real – and it’s real too for the women doing comparatively low-paid roles in academic departments and faculties who often face more barriers in challenging assumptions about what they should and shouldn’t be doing as part of their job.
tl;dr: HE is riddled with institutional sexism, as are most workplaces; women earn less than men; women get asked to do more/exploited more.
Thanks for writing this Jem, my first encounter with “wifework” and very thought-provoking!
On the subject of professors and gender imbalance, you might appreciate this: http://benschmidt.org/profGender/ It shows the prevalence of words used to describe teachers in online reviews, split by sex and subject
Reblogged this on David J A Bowe and commented:
We should be thinking in general about how we do affective labour in university settings. How do we, as faculty, support students with mental health and personal challenges to get the best from their university experience. How can we do the base level affective support which accompanies any pedagogical relationship. I had the immense good fortune as an undergraduate to have very supportive tutors during times of personal crisis. As a result I now find myself in the position of the tutor, of the one who has the opportunity to support struggling students, to do my damnedest to make sure they have appropriate access to support and to provide what pastoral care I can to allow them to get the best out of their university education.
I feel that the concept men should be ‘academic’ and women ‘nurturing’ is strong amongst undergraduate students. I can’t really put my finger on why, but often when I outperform male peers I feel as if I’ve upset some kind of unspoken balance, and that I’ll get a reputation for being ‘boring’ and ‘nasty’. Academic male peers are seen as ‘inspiring’ and ‘driven’. I suppose this is related to the view that academic female students are in some way rejecting their ‘nurturing priority’ in life. None of this is ever spoken aloud, but it there in undertones.
An example of sorts; upon receiving results, my male friends (rightly being proud) posted about it on social media. Whilst I had also received great results, I felt uncomfortable shouting about them as I knew the emotional affect my achievement would have on my other friends. Instead, I spent the day(and many others) trying to support those who were disappointed. Of course I wanted to support my friends, and I was never asked to do this, but I was always aware of how I would look if I didn’t do it and instead shouted about my results (as part of me wanted to).
The girls in my year are expected by peers to know when classes are, what we have to do, have medicine, know how to cook, how to do the laundry etc etc. I am by no means suggesting only girls do this, or that all girls do this, but if it is this way in the main, I do wonder what it is doing to girls studies and their confidence/pride in their ability.
See, I thought all this knowing when someone’s birthday is, where and when to be at what lecture, and the date of the next committee meeting was all due to me having a better memory than the other half…
Also, where does the ‘knowing stuff’ line stop? I can turn an oven on and cook something but also work a heating system, usually a ‘blue’ job in my opinion.
I think you hit the nail on the head – women are expected to be nurturing because it’s extra work. The expectation is always that females will take care of everyone else’s feelings at their own expense – the expense of females’ time, attention, money, and their own feelings. And it certainly happens at universities just as it happens in every setting, regardless of social class. Because men don’t want to. And they make up excuses about being unable to keep names and dates in their head – even though they keep silly details about their interests and hobbies in their heads without a problem – because that’s recreation, not work.
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One example that came to mind as I was reading this (as always, excellent) post was an anecdote in “You Just Don’t Understand,” Deborah Tannen’s book on the ways men and women are socialized to communicate differently. From p. 161:
“One Sunday I received a telephone call at home from a student who asked me a slew of questions about the dissertation she was writing. After spending a great deal of time answering her questions, I pointed out that she should really be putting these questions to her “mentor,” my colleague who had primary responsibility (and got primary credit) for guiding her research. The student replied that she had to have answers to her questions that day, and she didn’t want to disturb him at home.
“Why was it all right to disturb me at home on a Sunday, and not him, even though it was his job she was asking me to do? People find most women more approachable than most men. There are many possible reasons for this. Perhaps women’s time does not seem as valuable as men’s. Many of us can recall the feeling that our mother’s time was at our disposal, but our father’s time was reserved for more important pursuits outside the home; we had to wait for him to have time for us—so his time felt more valuable when we got it. But another reason for the greater approachability of women is there avoidance of conflict, which means they are less likely to respond harshly if displeased.”