So here’s a set of research findings that have caught me completely by surprise*: women’s careers in academia sometimes stall out on the road to full professorship because of heightened departmental and institutional service demands placed upon them. So reports Inside Higher Ed, in an article about Judith Glazer-Raymo’s new edited volume, Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education. Women, often socialized to prioritize responsibility for the functioning of groups over the demands of personal projects, are far more likely than men to find their research agendas derailed by administrative responsibilities.

This wouldn’t be such a problem, I think, if promotion and tenure processes genuinely valued such service; as it is, the high premium placed on scholarship, particularly at the moment of the review for full professorship, leaves many female faculty lagging behind their male counterparts. (The same is of course true of faculty of color, who find themselves in much higher demand service-wise than white faculty, and whose political commitments often necessitate prioritizing such service.)

The comments on the IHE article are, as one commenter points out, quite telling: a couple of (assumedly) male respondents pipe up with “quitcher whining and learn to say no,” while a number of other commenters point out the often wildly different — and gendered — levels of acceptance of that ability to say no. Men who say no to service requirements are at times seen as wisely protecting the time they need to conduct their research; women who do so are often treated as selfish and uncollegial.

A significant part of this problem rests in a vast disparity in our own internalized senses of responsibility to the collective body, of course, but I think only by starting conversations like these, by creating awareness of such disparities and the quite material effects they wind up having, can we begin to make any change.

—–
*Irony alert!

There was a day last week when I joked with R. that the entirety of the French air force flew over our flat, a few planes at a time, in tight formations. And really, really low. I assumed it was some kind of exercise — and I now think, in fact, that they were practicing for today.

We just had a very belated petit déjeuner at the café on the corner, whose muted television was tuned to the live broadcast of the military parade and other festivities being held for la fête nationale. Almost as soon as we got back into the flat, the flyovers began; they didn’t seem to go on as long as the practice version, but I could just be misremembering.

For me, there’s little in the way of fête today; I’ve got to get myself back into this chapter. The summer is zipping by, way more speedily than I’d like…

What would it take to convince US stationers/businesses/whomever else to abandon our attachment to “letter size” paper and adopt the more aesthetically pleasing A4? Some part of me is resigned to the fact that this is a losing battle, like persuading people that the metric system is not un-American. But the rest of me wants more elegant page proportions, thank you.

What does it mean that I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours obsessed with the stuttering transition from the on-its-way-out .Mac to (what I hope will be) the shiny (and more reliable, please god) new MobileMe? I am seriously impatient to start playing with the new toys.

Along which lines: I also want my iPhone 2.0. My 1.1.4 version has been, well, cleaned up and safely returned to a factory state, my iTunes has been updated, I’ve downloaded the first new Apps, and I’m waiting for the new system to appear. It’s after 8 am here; could somebody alert the server?

How much of this is just an attempt to distract myself from the agony I continue to experience in scratching out this chapter, one bloody sentence at a time? Every time I have a moment of clarity, I think, aha, a breakthrough! at last, the banging-my-head-against-the-wall phase is over! And I write like the wind — until the next transition, where I discover yet another new wall to bash myself into. Little wonder, I guess, that new tools seem really appealing.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours in a small café a few blocks from here, first doing some reading and then having coffee with a former student. The café’s quite cool — imagine a merger of French bar and college-town co-op coffee house — and felt somehow very much like home to me as soon as I walked in. It took a second to register how much so: the voices coming out of the café’s speakers were American. Not just American: familiar.

The café, it turns out, was streaming KCRW over the internet.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s quite cool that they can do so, and the music that played during the time I was there was great. On the other hand, there’s something in it that feels a little too much like the sudden explosion of Starbucks here.

Once upon a time, one went somewhere far away to see and hear and taste things one couldn’t see and hear and taste anywhere else. Now one can see and hear and taste many of the same things wherever one goes. Has the point of travel come down to simply being far away?

I’m having one of those brilliant, and altogether too rare, periods in the writing process when everything that I’ve been up to, but didn’t really know on a conscious level that I was up to, has suddenly clarified, and what seemed like random bits of noise suddenly coalesce into message. And I don’t want to stay away from it too long, but I did want to make a note of it — I spend enough time whining about the difficult moments in writing that it seems like a good idea to celebrate the moments when it’s going well, too.

Good grief but it’s disheartening to look at today’s “five years ago” post and realize that I’m not only still asking many of the same questions, but also still need to look in many of the same places for the answers.

On the other hand, it’s nice to recognize that, given all the false starts and diversions it feels like I’ve encountered since the days of the INP, I was at least partly on the right track then, and things are moving forward in appropriate ways.

This post brought to you by my misplaced Protestant work ethic, which demands progress, progress, progress!