My take: men should do better, women should say no more. But, more importantly, we need good managers. We're placing too much responsibility/power on the individual and not the senior management who should balance these responsibilities more appropriately and offer genuine support and mentorship.
A study on what many of us already know: over 75% of internal service work in academia is done by women. The bit that gets me:”The male associate professors in particular made it clear that they actively engaged in evasiveness and did not want to participate if it was not positive for their careers”
My view is, though, that managers tend to want jobs doing well and efficiently, and that contrasts with this kind of weaponised incompetence. I think managerial allocation is good, but there need to also be consequences for not doing admin/service work properly.
And I think, generally speaking, we can probably do less (collectively). There’s a lot of service work that probably doesn’t need to happen.
My chair genuinely thinks he is doing women and minorities a favor when asking us to do service because it gives us ‘visibility’ across campus, and then he can’t understand why we struggle to meet publishing targets.
There needs to be better recognition of the service loads in the performance evaluation. The other issue is with so few women in senior positions in academia if you want a balanced leadership (not dominated by white males) it ends up falling disproportionately on the senior women.