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Invisible labour: visible activism

by Sarah Montano, Inci Toral and Sarah Percy

Behind many academic success stories lies an untold narrative of invisible labour – a hidden force driving progress but often overlooked or undervalued. From providing emotional support to sitting on committees, the silent effort sustains institutions yet leaves many working tirelessly in the background on non-promotable tasks. Only when invisible labour is met with visible activism, can change begin.

As a group of academics over the years we became conscious of a phenomenon that affected not only ourselves but many of our colleagues. We particularly noticed that women* were increasingly being asked to take on emotional labour and tasks that, when it came to promotions were classified as “Non-Promotable Tasks” yet were essential to institutional practices. We concluded that this form of emotional labour was a form of wife work, work that is essential to the running of the home (aka Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)) yet often undervalued and the person carries the mental load. We use the term wife work due to the pejorative nature of wife work in the media and the value placed on such work in wider society. Using a feminist collaborative autoethnographic approach we explored invisible and emotional labour among female academics. Therefore, at the 2024 SRHE conference we delivered our paper on ‘Invisible Labour: Visible Activism’ and argued that it is only such activism that will help to end the inequities in HEIs.

*we acknowledge that invisible and emotional labour can affect any academic of any gender, particularly those on education/ teaching focussed contracts.

Shining a light on invisible labour

Despite the increase in women’s participation in the workforce and in academia, there is still a significant gender pay gap and to compound the issue, this gap widened in 2021 and 2022 in 20/33 OECD countries. As noted by Stephenson (2023), in HE only 28% of professors are female despite women making up 43% of the academic workforce leading to a pay gap of 11.9%. We acknowledge that the reason for such pay gaps and gender biases are complex and multi-factorial (Westoby 2021), thus we focus specifically on the issue of the “gender unequal distribution” of academic labour (Järvinen and Mik-Mayer 2024:1).

There is much discussion on the mental load outside the workplace; therefore, our focus is on the unpaid or unrewarded workload inside the workplace. As universities have new developed pathways to promotion (e.g. education or impact), citizenship has become less important, yet it is critical work that still needs to be done. However, the result of shifting paths to tenure/promotion means that women are carrying out “Non-Promotable Tasks” (Babcock et al, 2022: 15), which are institutionally important yet will not help career success.

Wife work defined

Wife work tasks include: writing references for students; mentoring; assisting students with emotional problems or recruitment; careers advice; taking on someone’s admin work whilst they gain awards; and committee work, effectively comprising what is known as service work. Importantly, a significant component of wife work is emotional labour. Emotional labour involves managing emotions and interactions in the academic setting without formal recognition or workload compensation. These emotional labour tasks may include student emotional support, listening, supporting colleagues, helping people or just always being nice. Such wife work occurs due to societal and institutional expectations that prompt women to take on such wife work, yet this labour whilst maintaining the organisation’s reputation and can lead to emotional dissonance and burnout (Grandey, 2013).

Making the invisible visible

Drawing on institutional theory​, feminist theory and theory of gendered organizations we explore how universities, embedded in social norms and values, perpetuate traditional gender roles and expectations. Our research specifically focuses on the “Non-Promotable Tasks,” which are essential for institutional functioning but do not contribute to career success and are undervalued and unrecognised. We highlight patterns about gender distinctions that lead to advantages or exploitations of academics and how these create differing identities and expectations within academia.​

How we uncovered the invisible

Our research has two stages. In the first stage, we used a feminist collaborative autoethnographic approach to explore invisible and emotional labour among female academics (Rutter et al, 2021)​. This method allowed for an in-depth examination of personal and shared experiences within our academic community (Akehurst and Scott, 2021)​. As the research subjects, we are comprised of female academics from the same department across international campuses, reflecting on our experiences with non-promotable tasks, emotional dissonance, mental load, and burnout (Grandey, 2013; Lapadat, 2017; Babcock et al, 2022)​. We go beyond individual experiences to co-construct the meaning of invisible and emotional labour collectively​.

Findings that shape our understanding of invisible labour

We identified the following categories of “wife-work”:​

  • Mentoring support (outside normal expectations or workload) ​
  • Administrative and Logistical Tasks/ Roles​
  • Recruitment and Outreach ​
  • Committee Work
  • Supporting Career Development
  • Academic and Professional Development​
  • Volunteering and Institutional Presence​
  • Helping people​
  • Taking on someone else’s role while they work on “important stuff”​
  • Listening​
  • Being kind ​

Using the institutional framework, in which the institutional norms shape the undervaluation of service work (Palthe, 2014), we argue that the regulative, normative, and cognitive-cultural elements of institutional theory contribute to the gendered division of labour.  Through the application of these key dimensions, our findings can be categorised under three dimensions:

1. Institutional Dimension, underpinned by the explicit rules, laws, and regulations that constrain and guide behaviour such as academic quality assurance and behavioural expectations within HEIs.

2. Social Dimension, encompassing implicit values, norms, and expectations that define acceptable behaviour within a society or organization such as social expectations around punctuality, dress codes, and academic etiquettes in HEIs.

3. Individual Dimension, which involves implicit but shared beliefs and mental models shaping how individuals perceive and interpret their environments. These are often taken for granted and operate at a subconscious level.

Using this framework our findings are categorised accordingly to these elements outlined in Figure 1 below.  

Figure 1:  Invisible Labour: Visible Activism Findings. Source: Developed by the authors

It’s time for change

We recognise that the critical issue is, as Domingo et al (2022) highlighted, the significance of recognising and valuing women’s work within institutions, and stress that the real issue lies within organisational practices rather than women themselves. Addressing emotional labour is vital for a supportive and equitable work environment. The burden of responsibility is deeply embedded into the societal norms and often acts as a catalyser for such responses by female academics (Andersen et al, 2022). ​As organisations shift their focus towards formal progress procedures that undervalue volunteerism and emotional labour (Albia and Cheng, 2023), there is a pressing need for activism to ensure equitable recognition and valuation of women’s contributions within academia.

A path forward – from silence to solidarity

Invisible labour has long been an unseen and unrecognised necessity in academia, but we argue that it need not, and should not be this way. Acknowledging and recognising the existence and value of invisible and emotional labour will ensure these ‘non-promotable’ tasks become more visible.  Therefore, there is a pressing need for activism to ensure equitable recognition and valuation of women’s contributions within academia. We emphasise the necessity of addressing these systemic issues to foster a more inclusive and supportive academic environment for all individuals involved. Change starts with awareness, so we hope this is a step in the right direction.

Professor Sarah Montano is a Professor of Retail Marketing at Birmingham Business School. She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2023. Her research interests are primarily authentic assessments, digital education and retail as a place of community. She is an engaging and skilled communicator and regularly appears in the media on the subject of retail industry change.

Dr Inci Toral is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, Business School and she is the Business Education Research and Scholarship (BERS) Convenor at Birmingham Business School. Her work revolves around digital marketing, retailing, creativity and innovation in retail education and authentic assessments. 

Dr Sarah Percy is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, with a special interest in authentic assessments.


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Unmasking the complexities of academic work

by Inger Mewburn

Hang out in any tearoom and you will hear complaints about work – that’s if there even is a tea room at the end of your open plan cubicle farm. Yet surprisingly little is known about the mundane, daily realities of academic work itself – despite the best efforts of many SRHE members.

Understanding the source of academic work unhappiness is important: unhappy academics lead to unhappy students and stressed-out administrators. If we know more about academics’ working lives, we are better placed to care for our colleagues and produce the kind of research and teaching our broader communities expect of us.

To understand more about academics’ working lives, we are embarking on an ambitious research project to survey 5000 working academics and would love you to take part.

Who is doing the ‘academic housework’?

Higher education institutions are major employers and substantial contributors to national economies. Yet there is a notable lack of comprehensive research on the practicalities of academic work, particularly with respect to how we bring our ‘whole self’ to work.

Just about everyone in academia is dealing with some aspect of their lives which affects how they do their work. Some are neurodiverse, with neurodiverse teenagers at home. Others may have a disability and are part of an under-represented group. More of us than you would think face financial precariousness and just being a woman can result in being given more of the ‘academic housework’. The impact of these various circumstances can be negative or positive from the employer point of view. For example, we know that neurodivergent academics spend a lot of energy ‘masking’ to make other people’s work lives easier, often at the expense of their own wellbeing (Jones, 2023). But we also know that including neurodiverse people in research groups can increase scientific productivity. At the same time, many neurodivergent people avoid disclosing for fear of stigma (even the word ‘disclose’ suggests that individuals should feel shame for merely being who they are).

Benefits for our employers can come at a great cost for us as individuals. While a body of literature exists on factors that affect student academic performance in university settings, there is no equivalent focus on university staff. The literature on students helps us design appropriate processes and services to try to even out the playing field and help everyone reach their potential. But we do not show this same compassion towards ourselves. The existing discourse on academics as workers tends to revolve around output metrics and shallow performance measures. This narrow focus fails to capture the full spectrum of academic labour and our lived experiences.

Our research aims to fill this gap by exploring how academics experience their work from their own perspectives. We seek to understand how the production of knowledge occurs, how academic work is constructed and experienced through daily practices, with a specific focus on academic productivity and distraction. We want to see how various bio-demographic factors interrelate and impact feelings like overwhelm and exhaustion.

Why this research matters

The importance of this study is multifaceted:

1. Informing Policy and Practice: By gaining a deeper understanding of academic work patterns, institutions can develop more effective policies to support their staff and enhance productivity and wellbeing.

2. Addressing Inequalities: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities in academia. Our research will explore how factors such as gender, caring responsibilities, and neurodiversity impact academic work experiences.

3. Adapting to Change: As the higher education sector continues to evolve, particularly in the wake of the pandemic and the rise of digital technologies like AI, it’s crucial to understand how these changes affect academic work practices.

4. Supporting Well-being: By examining the interplay between productivity, distraction, and work intensity, we can identify strategies to better support academics’ well-being and job satisfaction.

5. Enhancing Knowledge Production: Ultimately, by understanding and improving the conditions of academic work, we can enhance the quality and quantity of knowledge production in higher education and make better classrooms for everyone.

A comprehensive approach

Our study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a large-scale survey with follow-up interviews. This methodology allows us to capture both broad trends and individual experiences, providing a nuanced picture of academic work life.

The survey covers a wide range of topics, including:

– Perceptions of academic productivity

– Experiences of distraction and focus

– Work distribution across research, teaching, and administration

– Impact of factors such as neurodiversity, caring responsibilities, and chronic conditions

– Use of technology and AI in academic work

– Feelings of belonging and value within the academic community

We are particularly interested in exploring how these factors intersect and influence each other. For instance, how does neurodiversity impact experiences of productivity and distraction? How do caring responsibilities interact with gender in relation to the number of hours worked and where the work takes place? And who thinks AI is helpful to their work and how are people ‘cognitively offloading’ to machines?

Call for participation

The success of this research hinges on wide participation from across the academic community. We are seeking respondents from all career stages, disciplines, and geographical locations. Whether you’re a seasoned professor or a new PhD student, whether you identify as neurodivergent or not, whether you love academic life or find it challenging – your experiences are valuable and needed.

Moreover, this research provides an opportunity for self-reflection. By engaging with the survey questions, you may gain new insights into your own work practices and experiences, potentially leading to personal growth and improved work strategies.

Looking ahead

The findings from this study will be disseminated through various channels, including academic publications, teaching materials, and potentially, policy recommendations. We are committed to making our results accessible and applicable to the wider academic community.

We stand at a critical juncture in higher education. As the sector faces unprecedented challenges and changes, understanding the nature of academic work has never been more important. By participating in this research, you can play a crucial role in shaping the future of academia.

To participate in the survey or learn more about the study, please visit the survey here: https://anu.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eEeXg1L3RZJJWce.

Professor Inger Mewburn is the Director of Researcher Development at The Australian National University where she oversees professional development workshops and programs for all ANU researchers. Aside from creating new posts on the Thesis Whisperer blog (www.thesiswhisperer.com), she writes scholarly papers and books about research education, with a special interest in post PhD employability, research communications and neurodivergence.

Reference

Jones, S (2023) ‘Advice for autistic people considering a career in academia’ Autism 27(7) pp 2187–2192


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‘Care-free at the top?’ Exploring the experiences of senior academic staff who are caregivers

by Marie-Pierre Moreau

Over the years I have expressed a keen interest in the relationship between care and academia. This interest was triggered by my personal circumstances when, in 2008, as a research fellow and PhD student, I took my newborn daughter to the local university nursery and mused on the lack of research exploring the relationship between studying and parenting. What I did not know at the time was that, a decade later, I would be writing about this particular episode and that this thought would lead to the development of a range of research projects, initially focusing on student parents and, lately, on academics with a range of caring responsibilities. Earlier work I conducted with Murray Robertson on the latter group suggested that, at senior levels of the academic hierarchy, academic cultures are experienced as being particularly ‘care-free’, with one participant in particular describing care as ‘glossed over’ in senior academic cultures (Moreau and Robertson, 2017). Winning a 2017 SRHE Research Award enabled us to further explore the in/visibility and mis/recognition of care at that level of the academic hierarchy, as we embarked on the ‘Care-free at the top’? Exploring the experiences of senior academic staff who are caregivers project (Moreau and Robertson, 2019).

It is worth reminding here that very little is known about academics with caring responsibilities, and even less so about those carers who are in senior academic positions. So far, most research in this field has focused on ‘balancing’ motherhood and academic work and has ignored those with caring responsibilities other than the parenting of a healthy, abled child. Likewise, research on those in leadership and management roles has concentrated on their academic lives, usually in isolation of their more ‘personal’ commitments. Drawing on a post-structuralist feminist perspective and a corpus of 20 semi-structured interviews with ‘senior academics’ based in England, the research team explored how members of this group experience and negotiate their hyphenated identity, as senior academics who are also carers. In the stories they told us, participants went to great length to keep care ‘at bay’, drawing on a discourse of separateness which has been a long-lasting feature of academic cultures, in Europe and beyond. Think, for example, of Descartes’ philosophical proposition ‘cogito ergo sum’ and of one of its underpinnings, ie the view that our intellect suffices to define who we are. Despite considerable cultural changes over the centuries, the association of academic excellence with White, middle-class and ‘care-free’ masculinity subsists to this day (Leathwood and Read, 2008).

Yet it is also clear that, despite these discursive attempts to keep care ‘at bay’ and embody the subject position of the ‘care-free’ academic, participants’ narratives simultaneously highlighted the entanglements of care and paid work in their lives – a slightly expected finding in a context where the family and academia have been described as ‘greedy institutions’ which demand full availability and loyalty (Coser, 1974). In particular, this discursive construction of the academic as care-free appears highly gendered, as well as classed and ‘raced’, with considerable variations across this group of academics in terms of who can occupy the positional identity of the ‘care-free’ academic. Those who were the more likely to fit the default figure of the ‘bachelor boy’ (ie a white, middle-class, heterosexual academic) were less likely to experience the tensions arising from combining care and paid work than those belonging to marginalised groups. Women academics, and women academics from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in particular, often described their experience of combining the demands of paid and care work as a ‘struggle’ – a narrative broadly absent from the stories told by their male counterparts. It is also clear that those identifying as LGBTQ were exposed to additional difficulties in their attempt to perform a senior academic and a carer identity, in the context of academic cultures which remain predominantly heteronormative. Likewise, those with responsibilities other than the parenting of a healthy, abled child were, overall, the more dissatisfied with the support received from their institution on a formal basis, and the more pessimistic about significant improvements to this support in the future. Thus, there are considerable hierarchies and intersectionalities at play in the lives of senior academic carers, with their ability to swiftly perform a senior academic identity depending on their location at the intersection of multiple discourses and relations of power.

Such inequalities are maybe best illustrated by the contrast between Jeremy’s and Rosie’s narratives (both names are pseudonyms, with limited detail provided to protect participants’ identities). Jeremy (a professor and a father) talked about feeling ‘relentlessly positive’ about his job, with academic life constructed as eminently flexible and allowing him to care for his children. Combining caring and academia was, in his own words, ‘a very natural experience’. He did not identify any negative impact from being an academic carer, nor did he think there were any senior roles which might be challenging for carers to hold:

… but is any post not attainable?  No, I don’t think that’s correct at all, I think all senior management posts are entirely compatible with having a very active family life or indeed, a very active life without a family outside work.

In contrast, Rosie (professor, caring for parents) alluded to the multifaceted dimensions of caregiving (Lynch et al, 2009) and to its significant impact on her life:

… even when professional services are involved and are supposedly responsible for the person you were caring for, I am still responsible for my mum (…) So this issue affects your day-to-day living, your life, your working life, because if there’s a problem they ring you, she’s refusing personal care, she’s locking herself in her room, she’s throwing things, she’s abusing staff, and you’re the one responsible. It all comes back to you.

Also significant was the finding that some senior positions appear more open to carers. Managerial routes were viewed as particularly hostile to this group due to expectations of full availability and to the ‘ever present’ culture they were linked with, while a research professorship route was deemed highly demanding but more flexible and thus more ‘carer-friendly’. Managerial positions that still involved academic work (ie a pro vice-chancellor or a faculty dean) were deemed the most problematic for carers, due to the multiple demands on those occupying these positions and the resulting workload (eg when individuals have significant management responsibilities and are also expected to be research active).

In the context of an ageing and feminised academic workforce (HESA, 2018), the combination of paid and care work is likely to remain a key concern for the sector for many years to come. To challenge the status quo, we need to move away from a conception of carers as ‘encumbered’ and of care as ‘getting in the way’ of performing the neoliberal dream of the care-free, globally mobile and fully available academic. Instead, care needs to be conceptualised as a part of life that calls for recognition, with the figure of the carer normalised, in senior academia as elsewhere. This requires challenging care-free academic cultures – something individualised practices cannot achieve and even help to maintain. 

Based on the findings from this project, we made the following recommendations:

Recommendation 1: There is a considerable dearth of data regarding carers, including in senior academic positions. HESA and individual institutions should consider collecting data on academic staff’s caring responsibilities in intersection with other identity markers (e.g. position, gender and ethnicity).

Recommendation 2: The sector and individual institutions should mainstream care in university policies and practices so as to ensure that senior leadership roles are compatible with caring responsibilities. While this study highlights particular issues at this level of the hierarchy (eg mobility requirements, a ‘long hours’ culture, heavy workloads), these are likely to vary across institutions and subject areas. Thus, the views of carers should be sought before reviewing extant policies and developing new ones.

Recommendation 3: Institutions need to acknowledge the diversity, intersectionality and fluidity of care. This means a ‘one fits all’ solution is unlikely to be satisfactory. Policies should be flexible enough so that they can be tailored to suit the needs of various groups of carers, particularly women and those with caring responsibilities other than parenting, whose careers and well-being are more likely to be affected by their dual roles.

While the project is now completed and the final report published, the team continues to research this area, with the recent publication of an article on individualised practices of care in academia. Engaging with HE policy-makers and practitioners, as well as with the general public, is another ongoing aspect of our work. This has involved working closely with various HE institutions and national HE bodies; producing a short film on academic caregivers; and developing two briefing papers (to be published in the summer). In doing so, the team aims to raise awareness and encourage the development of policies which recognise and value the presence and contribution of carers in academia.

SRHE member Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau, School of Education and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. Contact details: marie-pierre.moreau@anglia.ac.uk. Marie-Pierre and Murray would like to thank the SRHE for their generous support, Prof. Nicky Le Feuvre, Université de Lausanne, who acted as critical friend on this project, our colleagues at Anglia Ruskin University, and the participants to this research who shared their life stories with us.

The following policy briefings may also be of interest:

Academic Staff as Caregivers

Students as Caregivers

References

Coser, L (1974) Greedy institutions New York, Free Press

HESA (2018) Who’s working in HE?: Personal characteristics.

Available online: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he/characteristics

Leathwood, C and Read, B  (2008) Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education: A Feminised Future? London: SRHE/Open University Press

Lynch, K and Ivancheva, M (2015) ‘Academic freedom and the commercialisation of universities: a critical ethical analysis’, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 15: 6-20

Lynch, K, Baker, J and Lyons, M (2009) Affective equality: Love, care and injustice Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Moreau, MP (2016) ‘Regulating the student body/ies: University policies and student parents’, British Educational Research Journal 42(5): 906-925

Moreau, MP and Robertson, M (2019) ‘Care-free at the top’? Exploring the experiences of senior academic staff who are caregivers London: SRHE

Moreau, MP and Robertson, M (2017) Carers and careers: Career development and access to leadership positions among academic staff with caring responsibilities London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education


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Organising, funding and participating in care-friendly conferences

By Emily Henderson

SRHE member Emily Henderson (Warwick) runs the ConferenceInference blog with Jamie Burford (La Trobe), offering a unique gateway to research about HE conferences. Her recent post is adapted and reblogged with permission here.

Conferences are highly exclusionary spaces for all manner of reasons. They are also vital sites for learning, knowledge production and dissemination, career development, and the formation of collaborations and partnerships for publications and research projects, sites where jobs are directly and indirectly advertised and secured, and sites of friendship, mentoring and all kinds of relationships. Conferences are recognised in research on academic careers as important sites which have a plethora of indirect benefits. Furthermore, attending, organising and being invited to speak at conferences are also expectations which are included in many promotions criteria and also in some hiring criteria (particularly for early career scholars who may not yet have a publication record). The role of conferences is often downplayed in practice and in research; amassing research and evidence on the impact of conferences on careers has resulted in a clear and irrefutable conclusion: missing out on conferences disadvantages academics in multiple regards. 

While the role of conferences continues to be downplayed – often by those for whom it is easiest to attend – there will continue to be hidden inequalities which contribute to overall inequalities in the academic profession and which cannot be addressed until fully acknowledged.

Based on some initial understanding of this problem from my doctoral work on knowledge production about gender at Women’s Studies conferences, and from personal experiences, I decided to explore the exclusionary nature of conferences – with a particular focus on caring responsibilities. The particular features of the stance taken in this project were: (i) a wide definition of care, to include partners, children, other relatives, pets, friends and kin; (ii) a focus on how care interacts with both access to conferences and participation in conferences while there.

In December 2016, I won internal funding from the University of Warwick Research Development Fund for a small-scale project on the relationship between conference participation and caring responsibilities. This was originally intended as a ‘pilot study’ for a larger project, but it touched a nerve and became much more than a pilot study – producing important findings and provoking widespread interest, including several invitations to present the research at events on inequalities and on care in the academic profession. The discussions in turn highlighted the need for further discussions – and for concrete outputs to influence the actions of those involved in organising, funding and participation in conferences. To develop the project’s trajectory further, in 2017 I applied for funding from Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Studies and embarked upon the production of a range of outputs for different audiences.

The project was assisted by Julie Mansuy in the first phase and Xuemeng Cao in the second phase, and I offer my sincere gratitude to them for their assistance with the logistics and implementation of this project. The outputs from the project, ‘In Two Places at Once: the Impact of Caring Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference Participation’, can all be downloaded or viewed from links included here (see also the events and outputs page on the project website).

The Conference Inference blog has already told parts of the story. ‘Conferences and caring responsibilities – individual delegates, multiple lives‘, explained how the project stemmed from the realisation that conferences are often designed for unencumbered delegates, and much conferences research (and indeed HE research in general) constructs an individualised academic subject who has no ties. The project explored conferences in their own right as sites which contribute to the development of knowledge, careers and collaborations, but also as a lens through which the academic profession as a whole can be viewed, given that conferences are both representative of and resistant to the institutional norms of academia (see Henderson, 2015).

‘Overwhelming care: reflections on recruiting for the “In Two Places at Once Research Project”‘, marked the moment where I realised that the project had touched a nerve. I was inundated with requests to participate – messages flooded in with enthusiasm and relief that someone was finally researching this – with snapshots of the complexity of academics’ lives, juggling care and academic work. The project research used a diary-interview method with 20 academics; a further 9 participants just filled in the diary. ‘Conferences and complex care constellations‘ revealed early findings, showing the range and complexity of different care constellations. This included temporary and long-term caring, shifting and dynamic care needs, hands-on and virtual caring, and a variety of different caring responsibilities.

The project has since produced a number of different outputs for different audiences, which all emerge from the study, with inflections from various discussions with colleagues, the project’s stakeholder group, reactions to the project I have received, and questions and comments from the various events at which I have presented the research.

Output 1: Recommendations briefing for conference organisers (view)

 This briefing, produced in collaboration with Leigh Walker and the Impact Services team in the Warwick Social Sciences Faculty, outlines how conference organisers can facilitate access to and participation in conferences for academics with a variety of caring responsibilities. Many considerations can be implemented at little or no cost (eg indicating evening social events in advance, or ensuring the wifi is easily accessible), but with significant impact. Care provision at a conference does not amount to providing a creche (see also Briony Lipton’s post, ‘Baby’s first conference‘). The briefing is targeted at both larger association conferences and smaller one-off events, which are often hosted in HEIs but tend to fly under the radar of institutional equalities policies.

Output 2: Recommendations postcard for Higher Education Institutions (Human Resources, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion personnel, Department Chairs) (view)

This is a short set of priorities for HEIs as a reminder that institutions expect their academics to attend conferences, but do not necessarily take responsibility for ensuring that academics are able to do so. While conferences are often portrayed as something like leisure – an optional extra (see ‘Conferences are (not) holidays‘), HEIs have a responsibility in this regard as long as academic promotions and hirings include conferences and the indirect outcomes of conferences such as publications and collaborative research projects – as well as ‘esteem’ and ‘reputation’ indicators. The postcard highlights the role of HR/EDI professionals in drawing together different relevant policies (eg relating to expenses claims, right to childcare, travel bursaries – see also the post about La Trobe’s carers’ travel fund) and the role of department chairs in being aware of and implementing policies.

Output 3: ‘Juggling Conferences and Caring Responsibilities’ short film (view)

 This short film, freely accessed on Youtube, aims to raise awareness of how conference attendance and participation are affected by the challenges of managing caring responsibilities. The film, produced by Mindsweep Media, includes reactions to ‘In Two Places at Once’ from: an EDI professional; a higher education and equity researcher; and academics with caring responsibilities (including a doctoral researcher with a young child, a dual career couple with a young child, and an academic who had cared for her elderly parents). Academics with caring responsibilities benefit from knowing that this is a shared issue and the film can be shown in training sessions and meetings for senior decision-makers.

Output 4: ‘In Two Places at Once: the Impact of Caring Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference Participation – Final Report’ (view)

Henderson, EF, Cao, X, Mansuy, J (2018) In Two Places at Once: The Impact of Caring Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference Participation: Final Project Report, Coventry: Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick. DOI: 10.31273/CES.06.2018.001

The project report is a more comprehensive but accessible resource, with recommendations for action by different parties, including EDI and HR professionals and people involved in the ATHENA Swan process or other equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. The report is also an academic resource for research in the areas of care, higher education, gender and the academic profession.

Next steps

A chapter focusing on the diary data was published in Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion in Critical Events Studies (Routledge, 2019), with two journal articles and a conference presentation planned. I am developing a broader research agenda focusing on intersectional issues of access to and participation in conferences. Updates will be reported at Conference Inference, on Twitter (#I2PO), on the project website, or email me (e.henderson@warwick.ac.uk) to join the project mailing list.

Follow Emily Henderson on Twitter @EmilyFrascatore.