Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for February 2026, Margaretha Järvinen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark). Her article for Current Sociology Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia, co-authored with Nanna Mik Meyer is Free Access this month.

Margaretha Järvinen

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

M. Järvinen: I came to this field of research about 5 years ago. The idea to study academic careers turned up during the Covid pandemic when my colleague Nanna Mik-Meyer (Professor at Copenhagen Business School) and I discussed differences in young men and women’s careers. We have both supervised and collaborated with a lot of young scholars during our time in academia and often noticed how young female academics face more challenges in their careers than young male academics. So we decided, right there, to start a research project on academic gender differences, with one of several research questions being: What does the ‘glass ceiling’ hindering women from climbing to top positions in academia consist of? We decided to interview social scientists – sociologists, economists and political scientists – and ended up with an unusually large qualitative data set: almost 176 in-depth interviews with associate and full professors at Danish universities. The response was overwhelming: around 85% of those we invited agreed to an interview. We conducted all the interviews ourselves.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia”?

M. Järvinen: This article is one of several articles from our study but the one that so far has received most attention. From the start, we had not given ‘service work’ in academia much thought. By ‘service work’ we mean organisational and administrative contributions (working groups, assessment committees, coordinator roles, conference and workshop organisation, editorial work etc.). We had the impression from previous studies and our own experience that women were more involved in such work than men but the results we found when analysing our own data, were astonishing. The gender differences were huge. Among associate professors in particular, a considerable part of the women seemed to be caught in ‘the sticky floor’ of service work while most of their male colleagues only devoted a minimum time to organisational contributions, and instead spent time on research, with the consequence that they got more publications on their CVs.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

M. Järvinen: The key findings are not only these systematic gender differences but also the mechanisms behind them. We identified four strategies used by academics to balance collective demands against individual career interests. The first strategy, which is actually a non-strategy, is compliance. Women are not only asked more often than men to take on administrative tasks, they also comply more often, either because they believe this is what everyone does or because their ‘no’ is not accepted. Part of the compliance phenomenon is also the widespread opinion that women are more competent than men when it comes to service work. The second strategy, which is practiced by much more men than women, is evasiveness. The male academics we interviewed were often keen on and successful in avoiding administrative tasks – a reason provided by some of them was that service work has low status and is of no significance for promotion to a full professorship. A third strategy was barter which also was a predominantly male way of negotiating service work. Barter turned up in situations where (male) participants were promoted on the condition that they take on a relatively time-consuming administrative role, such as head of studies or coordinator of a research center. Finally, investment was a question of doing service work in the hope of future pay-off whether in the form of privileges, positive evaluations or a useful network. Also here, men were more skilled than women in securing their own interests, often preferring short-term and very concrete ‘service investments’ such as organising small workshops with prominent international guests which turned out to be useful for their own careers.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

M. Järvinen: Our study has received a lot of attention here in Denmark. Nanna Mik-Meyer and I have presented our findings at most Danish universities, also for management. It seems like our Current Sociology article has been an eye-opener for some of them – and also for many female academics. Many of them were not aware that they contribute with much more organisational work than their male counterparts; that men treat service work as something you can say no to, and that the gendered service pattern may have negative consequences for women’s careers.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

M. Järvinen: Three other publications from our research are:

Järvinen, M. & Mik-Meyer, N. (2024). Turning Social Capital into Scientific Capital: Men’s Networking in Academia. Work, Employment and Society 39 (1): 302-320.

Järvinen, M. & Mik-Meyer, N. (2024). At the heart or on the periphery: gender, (in)visibility and epistemic positioning in academia. Gender and Education, Epub ahead of print 2024.

Järvinen, M. & Mik-Meyer (2025). Gaming and Performance Metrics in Higher Education: The Consequences of Journal Lists. Sociology, 59(4): 725-742.