Academic housekeeping denotes the type of work tasks within university departments that are low-status, time-consuming, largely invisible, and that nevertheless need to be done.
This article discusses academic housekeeping in a Swedish context, and holds that this topic has been overlooked in research. The aim is therefore to specify the meaning of the concept, to describe the gendered aspects of how academic housekeeping tasks are distributed, and to discuss possible explanations for the identified pattern.