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The Society for Research into Higher Education

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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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Pathways to inclusivity and diversity: building communities for women in science

by Jennifer Leigh and the Board of WISC

Talking about the gender imbalance in STEM is not new. Patricia Fara wrote a book on the history of women’s participation in science and explained clearly that women have always been interested in science – the fact is they have not always been given the opportunities to be scientists.

These days we can look at the lack of diversity in science and see that as well as barriers for women and other marginalised genders, there are barriers for anyone who does not fit the mythical stereotype of what a scientist might be. This might be because they are Black, or because they are disabled, or from a minority ethnic group, because of their sexuality, religion, or because they are the first in their family to enter higher education. Kimberlé Crenshaw described the way that these barriers accumulate and multiply as intersectional.

There has been a plethora of programmes designed to increase numbers of women in science, from the ADVANCE programme in the USA to the Athena Swan Charter used in the UK and globally. But there is still underrepresentation of women. Leading scientists such as Professor Rita Colwell, and advocates for women in science like Professor Sue Rosser, would say that in fact progress towards gender equity has stagnated. So, what can we do?

The approach taken by the International Women in Supramolecular Chemistry (WISC) network was to do things differently in order to effect immediate change. WISC was launched in November 2019 by Dr Jennifer Hiscock and colleagues after they realised the invaluable support they gained from an informal peer-support network. Chemistry has particular issues around the retention and progression of women. Whilst outreach has been successful, with women making up around 50% of all undergraduates choosing to study chemistry, less than 9% are full professors. This is a similar proportion to Physics, where fewer than 25% of A level students are girls. Rather than do yet more research that quantifies the numbers that make up the problem, WISC decided to use a novel area-specific approach that embedded qualitative and creative research methods more commonly associated with social sciences and arts. Rather than working on scientists, WISC chose to work with them, to gain understanding of the lived experiences of women who chose to stay in science.

The barriers to retention and progression that face women in chemistry are not new. Senior women and those who have left science have spoken up about dealing with sexual harassment, misogyny, and microaggressions. About balancing the chance to have a family with a career that places pressure on individuals in their late 20s to late 30s to travel, work excessively long hours, and be hyper-productive. They have spoken about the ‘old boys network’ in science where men use their positions of power and influence to help others, and the threat of losing their job or having to leave the field if they were to complain. In this last, science is probably no different from other parts of academia.

What WISC has done is to create a means by which women in the field now have been supported to share their stories with each other, to build a sense of community, kinship and mutual support through using creative and reflective means such as collaborative autoethnography. Then, together with data from qualitative surveys with a wider body of members, and ongoing reflective work with international research groups, they used narrative fiction to create a series of vignettes drawing from the research data. These vignettes allowed WISC to share the lived experiences and embodied responses of women in chemistry with a wide audience, whilst protecting all the participants from the dangers of being seen to complain or whistleblow. They collected these vignettes together in a forthcoming book from Policy Press. Dave Leigh FRS, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, wrote in the foreword to the book:

“Over my career I have seen many things change for the better in academia: Recruitment and promotion committees take genuine steps to avoid conscious and unconscious bias; schemes have been introduced that target women and other disadvantaged groups for independent positions; the increase in the number of women in chemistry departments has drastically changed the ‘macho’ culture that was prevalent 25 years ago. But the text and vignettes in this book, the latter composed from real experiences of women in supramolecular chemistry, paint a vivid, troubling picture that shows just why further significant change is still needed. The playing field is still not level. Whether that’s the fault of society, academia or supramolecular chemistry itself, I don’t know. But I suspect it’s all three. In reading this the most uncomfortable part of all was the persistent wondering if and how my own behaviour contributes to the inequality and experiences I was reading about. What do I do, or not do, that makes academia less fair on my women colleagues? And my questioning of that is, perhaps, the best reason of all for this book.”

WISC have created a means by which their members and participants can share their own experiences, and then utilise these safely to raise awareness of the challenges and barriers they face as they choose to stay in science. Their aim is not only to connect with women and other marginalised groups, but to use fiction to reach out to men as well, and from there to make change.

SRHE member Jennifer Leigh is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice at the University of Kent. She is Vice Chair of Research in WISC, Co-Lead of the NADSN STEMM Action Group, and sits on the SRHE R&D committee. At Kent she is a Co-Chair of the Disabled Staff Network, Co-Chair of the Visual and Sensory Research Cluster, runs the Summer Vacation Research Competition, and is on the Thriving@Work Working Group. Her books include Ableism in Academia, Embodied Inquiry: Research methods, Conversations on Embodiment and the forthcoming Women in Supramolecular Chemistry: Collectively crafting the rhythms of our work and lives in STEM. See also recent article in ScienceDirect Managing research throughout COVID-19: Lived experiences of supramolecular chemists


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Mind the Gap – Gendered and Caste-based Disparities in Access to Conference Opportunities

In an interview with Conference Inference [1] editor Emily Henderson, Nidhi S. Sabharwal discussed inequalities of access to conference opportunities in India.

Figure 1: Participation in Conferences by Gender (in a high-prestige institution)Figure 1: Participation in Conferences by Gender (in a high-prestige institution)

EH: Nidhi, can you explain first of all where conferences come into your wider research on inequalities in Indian higher education?

NS: Equitable access to professional development opportunities such as conferences is an indicator of institutional commitment to achieving diversity and inclusion of diverse social groups on campuses. Continue reading →