‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’: Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible

This essay uses rhetorical genre analysis and autoethnography to theorize about women administrative faculty members’ engagement with academic career genres such as tenure and promotion dossiers and annual performance reviews. The guiding research question for the chapter is: what are the experiences of women who occupy both faculty and administrative roles, and how do existing academic career genres make transparent or obscure these experiences? Two major themes were identified: 1) academic career genres reflect patriarchal, gendered assumptions about labor that constrain women administrative faculty members and 2) these genres do not provide space for emotional labor related to role duality and conflation that women administrative faculty members engage in daily on the job.