In this section, we examine the three key areas of professional activities that characterize the day-to-day job of a faculty member: teaching, service, and research. Different departments weigh the value of these three activities differently, but in the Research I institutions, research is likely to be a primary concern. It is commonly believed that women spend more time teaching or performing service-related activities and less time on research than male faculty.
A note about time spent in professional activities is necessary. There are two ideas here: how many hours male and female faculty work and how they divide up the time they spend. Several studies have looked at the number of hours male and female faculty work and have found they tend to work long hours and similar numbers of hours. For example, a self-assessment conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found both men and women work nearly 60 hours per week. The NSOPF:04 found that full-time, professoriate faculty at Research I institutions in science and engineering (S&E) worked about 58 hours per week on average (58.5 for women and 58.1 for men).[58] Rather than ask faculty members how many hours they work, our survey asked respondents how they divide their time among research, teaching, and service. That is what we report here.