Does Service, Scholarship, and Teaching Activity Vary Across Demographic Groups and Time? Changing Patterns Among Professors at Two University Campuses

The three main dimensions of academic activities that guide tenure and promotion in academia are scholarship, teaching, and service. As the academic professoriate has diversified in recent decades, there has been a concerted effort to understand and remove any unequal expectations or obstacles that could affect how professors from different demographic groups divide their workloads between these three activity categories. While some research has identified disproportionate workload burdens placed upon some underrepresented groups, questions remain about how academic activity varies between individuals within different groups and how academic activity changes over time. In this article, we ask: Does self-reported academic activity (i.e., scholarship, service, teaching) vary across demographic groups or across academic rank, and do patterns in reporting vary over time across demographic groups? To address these questions, we utilized a 7-year data set of self-reported academic activity from 1,688 professors at two campuses of a public university. We observed that female professors reported more annual service and teaching activities than their male counterparts and that White professors reported more service and scholarship activities than several other racial groups. We also identified temporal trends among these relationships, with the difference in reported service activities between female and male professors increasing and several differences between racial groups decreasing across our study period. Our study contributes to a growing understanding of patterns in academic workload across demographic groups and sheds light on disparities in workloads that may exist within academia. Additionally, our methodological approach highlights opportunities and the challenges of using self-reported activity data to assess faculty performance.