Many female faculty say that they take on excessive administrative and mentoring responsibilities.
"A theory is that it's expected that women nurture and mother," Epps says. "And if they don't, they're not assuming a feminine role."
Georgi says he thinks female faculty members at Harvard are disproportionately overworked.
"Women have more advising hours, do more theses," Pellegrini says. "I like meeting with students at Harvard, but a good teacher is a way to damn a person for tenure, because they're going to look at your scholarship."
According to Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby this pattern holds, especially when women in a department are few and far between.
"40-45 percent of the students are women and there's two women in the department," she says. "There's no way you're not going to get a very disparate load."