Women's Time‐Thirsty Work and Time Generosity in Knowledge Production

The trope of the “three‐legged stool” belies the imbalance and messiness of academic work as interrelated teaching, research, and academic service. A temporal lens on women academics' research work surfaces gendered discourses of time allocation and workload models, work–life, and work–work imbalance. Here, we focus on challenges women face in research work, and the resources available in research work. We report findings from two distinct but related research projects: (1) an online open‐text questionnaire designed to investigate women's work and well‐being at a research‐intensive university; and (2) a reimagination of feminist leadership praxis in higher education. The first project was linked to activity aimed to improve research culture. The second, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship project, aimed to co‐construct understandings of feminist leadership praxis with women working in UK higher education (UKHE). Feminist post‐structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) was used to analyze responses. Survey participants framed challenges in a temporal discourse of time‐thirsty work marked by need, urgency, and time consumption that led to the impossibility of balancing work and life priorities satisfactorily. Resources were framed in discourses of academic and operational support and services where (un)funded time facilitated research work. Applying a temporal lens to dialogic narrative interviews, we surfaced a feminist discourse of time generosity, associated with time spent providing support. Responding to need, mentoring, and valuing time were features of gifting time or working with a spirit of generosity with respect to the time spent. Drawing on feminist conceptualizations of time, we argue that workload planning models underestimate the time thirstiness and time generosity of women's work. Consequently, the neoliberal university system assumes the existence of funds of disposable time for research purposes and relies on unpaid overtime and goodwill to function. Thus, workload models are unfit for purpose. University leaders have a duty of care to recognize temporal rhythms of time‐thirsty work beyond the commodified clock time of a capitalist economy.