Report
The academic women’s trap Tidying away dishes, organizing the Christmas party, doing the administration for seminars, resolving conflicts ... Some jobs within academia do not contribute to your scientific credentials but they still have to be done. It is called academic housekeeping and mainly affects women. – DO YOU MEAN ordering goods,
managing the lab, making sure there are gloves and that kind of thing? Ingela Dahllöf, Pro Dean of the Faculty of Science, wonders when the GU Journal phones her. She continues: – Of course I’ve done that. It starts as a junior; you want to prove yourself, so you put in a tremendous amount of effort and it is only when it starts to become an unspoken norm that you begin to see the pattern: “Why do I always do this?” It took a few years before I asked myself that question and stopped. But no one else took on those tasks.
INGELA DAHLLÖF’S experience is typical, at least if you are to believe the studies in the field. Sara Kalm, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Lund University, first came across the term academic housekeeping in American research. – It highlighted something I had known about for a long time but couldn’t really put into words. She began to take an interest in the phenomenon and, in conjunction with a course in gender
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GUJOURNAL MARCH 2020
