Female staff as university wives

[MargaretVivienne]

Does anyone else feel like they're just doing the university's equivalent of Wifework?

Doing a disproportionate amount of the "childcare" (children being both students and colleagues)

Responsible for most of the "housework" (keeping labs safe & tidy)

Carrying the mental load involved in reminding colleagues of deadlines & changes to regs etc, apologising to professional services on behalf of the colleagues who've messed them around, chasing for completion of peer observation, moderation etc.

I've just realised that I've sleep-walked into something I never wanted, & I genuinely think I've fucked my career.

It's like I've suddenly woken up & everything I used to see as an achievement (pretty much all teaching-related, like great student feedback) just feels a bit hollow.

I don't know how to push back, and I think it's too late to salvage my career anyway. I'm in a very male dominated STEM field, which is probably relevant.

I am in STEM but a less male dominated field. Lab tidying is everyone's job (I do less lab work these days - modelling, fieldwork and large dataset analysis is more my speed) but with more female colleagues maybe we are more cooperative. Plus we have a couple of scary lab managers and PhD students (not British, maybe that helps) who keep us in line.

I avoid teaching hand holding, it means I've been seen as not "maternal" like female lecturers are supposed to be but I reckon female academics are going to get poorer feedback anyway so why bother.
I have kind of focussed on science communication as a way to advance (doesn't need as much funding as research).

I would recommend giving fewer fucks. Don't nag the colleagues, tell the students where Student Support is located.

It’s absolutely a thing. I work in the sector but not in an academic role. What I observe is male academics (all disciplines) will unapologetically avoid the academic housework and focus on what furthers their career, leaving female academics to pick it up, even if only in a conscientious ‘well, someone has to do it’ way. I know it’s easier said that done, but if these activities aren’t part of your actual role I’d drop the rope.

I work in professional services / admin but agree! I notice this in my department too.

It's a well known thing.
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/wife-work-invisible-labour-in-academia-a-call-for-accelerated-action

I just don't know how to drop the rope. If I can stretch the metaphor a bit further - you know when SAHMs go back to work, & they can't get back to a fairer distribution of domestic stuff because their OH has got so used to them doing it all?

I feel kind of powerless to get anyone to recognise just how much I'm doing, and I have no idea how to get anyone else to step up!

I can see I should have played it differently from the start, but I am where I am. Are there any practical things I can do to change it?

Oh boy yes, so much this. I'm sort of in recovery from this (frequent relapses, sadly). Unfortunately there is a certain amount of pushback when you do start putting boundaries in. In fact I just received an email from a (junior!) male academic furious with me because he hadn't followed policy and couldn't claim expenses back for something. I'm still not entirely sure how this is my fault since I had nothing to do with the event concerned, but I can't be bothered to respond. Oh and being on the ethics panel is a classic - inbox full of snark from men who are absolutely flabbergasted they are being asked to not be dicks. I'm so over them all.
/rant, sorry.
Solidarity! Try and let them wash over you and find some allies to buddy up with is the only advice I have.

Ha - I've also had the expenses issue. Quite why a well-qualified man couldn't just read the policy & stick to it is anyone's guess. It was definitely my fault though 🙄

I've got good female colleagues whose experiences are the same, but mostly we rage impotently & don't change anything.

I'm menopausal and finding the whole thing really difficult. Like I woke up and now I just do not care. I feel so flat and unmotivated.

I can't say it is exclusively male staff taking the piss, however. One or two younger female colleagues seem to think magic fairies do paperwork or arrange things! One whines to me that we need to have xyz or make sure X happens.... So sort it out then!! Don't whine to me and expect me to sort it for you!

Older male entitlement is just a given. Last year one was being so rude to me in a workshop I facilitated, I just sighed and left. I just couldn't care less. I don't want to spend my time on earth with this idiots.

I need to reconnect with something meaningful in my work or I am going to seriously struggle until retirement which is a good decade away or more.

I thought perhaps I could lean into the teaching but yesterday's class were struggling with simple concepts and I felt like my entire professional existence was futile. I laugh or id cry.

Solidarity

They're too important for such trivia

I think it’s strange to view admin and coordination as ‘wife work’ rather than strategy and planning. I think it shows more about how you view your role than about anything pasted onto you as a woman.

Sounds like you want to be the boss and you’re not the boss and that’s annoying you. I’m student staff so I get treated like an idiot by the very people I am coordinating and chairing meetings for. You just have to crack on and realise that very few people are ever top of the food chain.

Unless you’re doing work that isn’t actually part of your role…

This is exactly how men move forward faster in every career. Self-interested focus. No sense of mutual responsibility for tedious tasks. The inherent ability not to care, not to feel conscientiousness.

Nature or nurture eh? Societally enabled either way.

But how you stop, I think is to drop the rope. Let the pain ensue. Look on as audience. Fake incredulity. Don’t jump in to save or smooth the situation.

Start of term always requires an amount of housekeeping regarding teaching schedules, info etc. I can see this has not been updated by the male leads on two courses I'm about to start and I am forcing myself not to step in and do it ... because I know what a slippery slope of expectation that is. Yes - you have to drop the rope.

But then two of us (female academics) just got played and handed some extra teaching (for a male academic) under an attempted-but-failed disguise of being helped out.

The season of competitive important busyness has begun.

It's absolutely a thing. And I think as others have suggested it's spreading to new staff too of both sexes as they see the "old guard" takes care of business so why would they do things that are in scope of their role but not explicitly required per se.

I've got a bloody awful manager. He called a long meeting last week with no agenda. Discussed an issue I know something about as I sit on the group which looks into the issue (student visa compliance). Tells me in front of everyone I'm incorrect (I was not).

Interesting email yesterday asking for a heads up on that very topic. Now I could of given him a detailed reply. Nah, you want to be a dick, I can play that game too. Short reply confirming that everything was as I've previously outlined. He actively ignores any requests for information when I make them so I can play this game too.

I was the head of ethics for the university for a long time. People and particularly men throw a hissy fit when you tell them no and throw their title at you. I'm still not granting approval on research which is not well detailed.

Student support is absolutely pushed onto any empathetic staff and this tends to be the women and/or people who have been around for a while. I see new colleagues making zero attempt to familiarise themselves with the regulations and various lines of support for students.

I made a decision last year to step back as it's thankless work from leadership. I don't work from my desk, I go down to the floor below and work quietly there. I don't organise leaving dos, Christmas parties, the collection for Macmillan etc like I did for probably 10 years. I helped colleagues write their promotion/pay rise applications too but I've withdrawn from all of it.

My boss actively bullies me. A colleague admitted to me last week she sees how apparent it is and so do colleagues. I went home feeling vilified that I'm not imagining it. It's been going on for 3 years. The next day I told a friend in a different dept and you know what she said...why haven't people gone to HR on my behalf. And I know deep down that is why I'm done. They've seen it and been complicit because while he picks on me he leaves others alone. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job he still actively seeks to make it as difficult and be as dismissive as possible.

Honestly fuck being nice. Do you thing and leave others to it. I feel less stressed for it. My job is in and out now, my friends are all in other depts and I feel appreciated by them. Most people don't deserve the extra. It's hard to stop but then you realise it's not appreciated it's so much easier.

Actually, working elsewhere is a really good idea! Part of my problem is that everyone knows where to find me, so instead of finding the person who should be sorting something, they come to me.

I'm sorry to hear about the issues other people have had. I don't think people outside understand how unpleasant & difficult working in a university can be. Depends on what you're doing & who you're working with, clearly (if you're sat at home, only come in to do the teaching you never update, refuse any citizenship roles & only pretend to do research, it's presumably pretty sweet!)

I didn't mention my age or role, but I'm in a leadership role, & i think in trying to change things for other women, I've actually ended up doing everyone's share of the crap, rather than getting everyone (including the men) to divide it fairly. I should be able to make that happen, but I can't see how. We have pathetically weak HR. People do all far worse than never supporting open days, or not meeting their students & I have no tools to deal with it.

In a way, I'm heartened to hear that younger female academics aren't doing it. Why should they do it if the men aren't? Ultimately though, that's not an answer if it's stuff that needs doing.

@MargaretVivienne my experience of HR is the same. The issue with universities is that academics are not well managed and in many cases unmanageable. I find many colleagues are pretty selfish and self centred. Very few are truly supportive. I carry lots of responsibility but have little support. I think that's common.

In your shoes I would stop trying to change the culture and make anything better for others and focus on making it better for yourself in whatever way you can.

I don't think my younger female colleague is stopping doing work that other male colleagues won't do, she's just got a similar selfish attitude of moaning about something to me and not taking responsibility for it herself. She likes credit but not the work that gets things done.

People not doing what is needed is hard. Sometimes it's subtle. If you escalate to line managers, it can come back on you. I think that's probably the big problem for you @MargaretVivienne . If your immediate manager is awful where does that leave you?

Any side steps you can make to get out of working directly with this man?

She likes credit but not the work that gets things done.

IMHO this underpins a lot of the issues discussed in this thread. University culture and processes (appointments, promotions...) increasingly incentivise maximising the credit-to-effort ratio. What matters is not what you've actually done, but what other people think you've done.

so much resonates, from the competitive busyness to the colleagues being flaggergasted that their expenses won't be processed.

i ve sorted my own situation by

1. adopting a nix of the lines "your lack of planning cannot be my emergency" and "fuck no, not today, satan"
2. moving and leaving these sordid people behind in their toxicity new place may turn to be as bad, but at least i m an unknown quantity and cannot be taken for granted just yet...

When I joined my current department, I was only the second female member of staff. A third woman joined the following year. For years it was only the three of us, less than 25% of total staff numbers, until a string of retirements and hires the past couple of years have changed the proportions to almost 50/50.

For all those years (10+), if you looked at the student-facing roles (degree convenors, Exams convenor, wellbeing convenor, etc.) you would find at least two of the three women undertaking at least one of those roles each at any given point, and very often it would be the three of us. If you looked at the high prestige, low student-friction admin roles within the School/University (research convenor, REF Lead, Impact Lead), it was the opposite - all men-exclusive for those 10+ years.

The first bitter realisation was that many academic men (maybe it's more prevalent in the Humanities) will admit that academia has a gendered problem with emotional labour at the structural level, but will categorically deny that such structural problems are mirrored in their immediate environment, i.e. where they may have a say and some responsibility. At some point I wanted to encourage conversations in my department about gendered responsibilities, thinking that I would get somewhere, and all I got from the men was "well this is just how it panned out, we are a small department", "well it makes sense that we all do what we are best at and what if she are particularly good at this kind of work", etc.

The second bitter realisation was that women can often be their own worst enemies. The other female staff member, who was slightly older and more senior than me, took me under her wing when I arrived, and proceeded to prime me on how important it was that we all share student-facing roles, that we all do some of the boring first-year teaching, that we all are an honor tent... With new male colleagues she never did any of that - probably because she knew most of them would have laughed at her face.

I've bought the book recommended up thread, & I'm finding it really interesting. There's an attempt to understand how we end up doing it this shit. I think at some point we've probably all thought we're our own worst enemies, but it does explain how the whole environment makes it really difficult to just say no. It's not just women being weak, it's a whole system that works to pressure you into it.

I've tried so hard in my own context to support female colleagues & not put these expectations on them, but I've done it mostly by taking even more of the crap myself.

Amongst today's joys I have a meeting with one of our male professors who has no research income, does no teaching & can't be allowed near people management because he's utterly toxic. He can't manage non-people stuff either because he chaotic & can't be bothered with detail. I haven't identified a single thing he's even competent, let alone good at, yet here we are. At some point someone made him a professor.

Good times

Gosh, I'd love to see his professorial application. What does he do all day?

I only do things that are because of my role.

I am a project manager on one of my contracts, so it's my job to oversee the reporting or help events happen. I'm module organiser on another contract; I have a male colleague falling over himself with eagerness to teach, actually.

If you take on extra jobs that make you unhappy, that sounds a bit like control freakery, people-pleasing or perfectionism, tbh. You have control over how much you're like that.

I think women do often bring this on themselves. I am a professor, reserach only, and I don't do anything outside my designated roles. Some of those roles (REF etc) are faculty wide and a right ovary-ache, and I do them well, but fuck me I'm not going to volunteer for anything else or pick up someone else's work. I had to get a mentee (female) to stop volunteering for thigns. People need to know early in their career that the way to be a success AND have a good w/l balance is to become indispensable in one area, not being nice and helpful across the board

Is there any point meeting him? Can’t you just say ‘hi, I don’t see an agenda for this and I haven’t anything to go over, so let’s move it a month and see if there’s an agenda then.’
you aren’t going to achieve anything, why go?