Committee Service

In addition to asking about the percentage of time spent on service, our faculty survey asked respondents how many committees they have served on. The view is that, in order to make committees more diverse, women are more frequently asked to serve on them, with the result that they serve on more committees than men do. The faculty survey asked respondents if they had participated in 10 types of departmental committees: undergraduate curriculum, graduate curriculum, executive, promotion and tenure, faculty search, fellowship, graduate admissions, facilities or space, program review, and “other.” An initial variable was created that summed participation on the nine identified committees. While the actual range was between zero and nine, few faculty served on more than six commit­tees, and disaggregated by field, there were many cells which contained no faculty members. Therefore, faculty members who served on six or more committees were aggregated into one category of those serving on six or more committees, so that at least one faculty member fit into each cell when the respondents were disaggregated by gender and field. Overall, the average number of committees served on was similar for men (1.61 committees) and women (1.76 committees) (see Appendix 4-8).