So what should be done? Can’t just wallow in our sadness. What reforms at the university level would we like to see instituted? (On Thursday, we’ll talk about broader political and social reforms)
Ianqui kindly sent me a Chronicle article in which the author gives advice about what kind of institutions future mothers should seek out. Some universities are more accomodating than others. [It’s not on line yet, so I’ll give you the highlights.]
Because the average age of female Ph.D. recipients is 34; because female assistant professors with children typically spend 90 hours or more per week on their job, housework, and child care; and because the flexibility in the timetable for earning tenure is limited, female graduate students who would like to have both children and an academic career should think carefully about when and where to have a baby — long before they seek their first job.
The author says that women should seek employment at public college or university, because they are more likely than private ones to have policies for maternity and child-rearing leave that meet the minimum standards of federal law. Women should look for an institution with a written policy for maternity and child-rearing leave and with a generous leave policy. Women should only offer accept offers that come with a private office to tuck away a small infant or to breastfeed. Women should seek out institutions with day care on or near the campus, where senior colleagues regularly bring their
children (of all ages) to work, and where the norm is faculty colleagues who are proud of having lives outside of work.
Of course, the author assumes that most job candidates are awash in job offers. Most people on the market I think are just happy if they get one offer.
What kinds of programs would parents like to see instituted at universities?
Apt. 11d 
Public institutions with unions are good, but our union contract gives us paid leave only on medical grounds, so we can’t take more than 6-8 weeks. I’ve heard the clerical workers’ union at our institution contract gives that paid childbirth leave to them, but not us. I guess there haven’t been enough professors in the system agitating for this benefit, due in part to the aging of the faculty. So I would say that professors have to have at the very least a reasonable amount of paid leave–3 months or so–and they have to replaced by paid adjuncts rather than by fellow faculty members who are forced to “help out.”
It also helps not to feel guilty, and for the institution to make it a priority not to make women feel guilty. It’s one thing to do what you have to do, or want to do; unfortunately I think that women sometimes feel guilty if they don’t go above and beyond. I’ve heard that women also play unrepresentatively large roles on committees and the like, presumably because they get their arms twisted into it. On my campus, substantial committees are often run entirely by women (a fact we’ve been noticing more and more). Women cannot be expected to do all the grunt work on campus, as they so often do at home, that’s a change that certainly has to be made.
As for major structural changes: I’m not sure stopping the tenure clock will really benefit women, as it will push them further behind men. The only changes that would really help I think are those that involve the total reworking of the academy. I think to be family and life friendly the prestigious institutions (and those that want to be prestigious) have to stop expecting books early on in one’s career. Major works should be the culmination of years, not quick and anxious product of a desire to keep one’s job.
But working at a less prestigious institution helps with that problem, and that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. It hardly helps to further women in academia, obviously.
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Hi Laura,
Here are my two-cents worth based on my own experience:
Life circumstances – meeting my partner in my mid-thirties – meant that I had my son in my late thirties. I had finished my Ph.D. and was two years into a tenure track job. My son was born 6 months ago so I’ve just started the parenting/academic thing. We have been lucky in some respects and not so lucky in others. We both have dept chairs who are very understanding. The chair of my dept gave me a semester of paid leave and a semester of unpaid leave – not so bad! My partner’s chair is pro-paternity leave too. On the other hand my partner and I do not have positions in the same place – actually not even in the same country as his university is in Canada. So, right now I’m in Canada and will stay here until the beginning of the spring semester. My partner will then come back to the States with me (using up his ten weeks paternity leave). After that we don’t know. We are both applying for jobs and really hoping that something somewhere works out.
As I see it there are several problems with trying to combine family and academic life. The tenure system means that it is extremely difficult to take time out to have and care for your children. No other profession, that I know of, is run with such make or break rules. Would a female lawyer have to abandon her career if she didn’t make partner status within 6 years? I would really love to have a second child but I’m not sure it will be possible. The other problem is the lack of universities with spousal hire policies. How can you combine work and family if work means that one half of your family is living in a different state/country? I know that we are going to have to really grapple with this one soon. I am loathe to give up a tenure track position for adjuncting but as my partner earns more (he’s in the sciences) but that’s a very real possibility. We are desperately hoping that something will work out with the next spate of job applications. If not some hard decisions will have to be made.
On another note – does anyone know of differences between the sciences and humanities when it comes to maternity, paternity leave, tenuring women, etc? There are, of course, big differences in salaries. There are also big differences when it comes to graduate student experiences: science students often get funding all the way through; humanities students have to work their way through their degrees with underpaid TAships etc. As women tend to predominate in the humanities the burden, again, falls on them. It seems that having children during your graduate degree is as difficult as having them after graduation. But, of course, you can’t always plan these things anyway.
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Personally, I think we should go for the kind of maternity leave policies in place in Canada or Scandinavia. I was in Canada at a wedding talking with a pregnant woman who was talking about how long she was going to take off of work with this baby – she said that after her first child she took of 7 months but that wasn’t quite enough, so she thought this time she would take 9. The conversation continued and one of the other Canadians realized that I was clearly not getting something, and explained that Canada has a policy of ONE YEAR of paid maternity leave. I just about fell off my chair.
And I think this should apply throughout the US, not just in academia.
Not that I’m holding my breath.
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Yes, paid parental (not just maternity) leave would be a start, and some kind of system that encouraged ALL parents to take it–better for them, better for their kids. And it would enforce some kind of rough equity between fathers and mothers if fathers actually took some time off as well. See Anne Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood for a discussion of a system in which men DO take time off.
Flexible tenure policies with no hidden costs for taking advantage of them would be another. What if tenure clocks were, oh, say, ten years long, but anyone could select any time between five and ten years? And there were no particular preconceptions about what that meant?
And yes, not requiring a book for tenure would be good. I think that’s insane anyway, given the current realities of academic publishing–my own institution is increasingly requiring a book right at the time it’s increasingly difficult to get one published. So that’s got to change.
Of course, I’d love it if the academic schedule and the public school schedule were better synchronized so that I didn’t go back to school three weeks before my kids do, but that may be asking too much of the world!
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The one year of paid maternity leave is fairly recent, here in Canada, and that’s a reduced pay (60%, I believe? paid partly through UI). If you take six months, you get full pay and between six and twelve is a sliding scale.
When I was pregnant, the options were three months at full pay or six months at reduced. As I was the major breadwinner during the first pregnancy and the sole breadwinner during the second (husband went back to U for a second degree), I couldn’t choose the reduced salary option.
Nevertheless, I think that increased maternity and paternity leaves are a good start, along with an institutional culture that doesn’t punish you for taking those leaves.
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I don’t know about the sciences, but in the humanities it would be an all-things-considered improvement if we made tenure decisions solely on the basis of what the candidate judged as his/her best 4 or 5 pieces of published work — and asked letter writers to read and consider ONLY those. This would favur quality over quantity, and give people incentives to focus on really good and important pieces. It would also remove, partly, the bias against mothers of young children, many of whose quantity of production suffers, but many of whose quality does not.
If we dared, we might also aim for sex-specific tenure- clock-stopping. Many men use the year they gain from having a child to accumulate more publications; almost all women use it to look after their children. But as someone says above, I doubt that clock stopping helps anyone that much.
But I am hard pushed to think of measures that would achieve, say, equal prospects between mothers and non-mothers. I’m a father, and find that academic life is probably much more freindly to fatherhood than other professions — less work, more flexibility, etc. More importantly, though, even though I am by a slight distance the primary caretaker, my wife (a teacher) is almost an equal caretaker most of the time; most academic mothers are not married to almost-equal-parenting men.
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One of the ideas that was thrown around at the Invisible Adjunct awhile back was adding a different level of faculty. Something better than an adjunct in terms of salary and respect, but less demanding than tenure track. NYU has started experimenting with such a system, but I think the unions are in an uproar about it.
Arlie Hochschild argued in a book chapter entitled “Inside the Clockwork of Male Careers” for a part time tenure tack position. Any tenure-track faculty member with caregiving responsibilities for children, elderly or ill family members, or partners could, with sufficient notice, request that he or she be placed on half-time status for a period of from one to 12 years. Workload, including teaching, research, advising, and committee work, would also decline by one half. Benefits and advancement would be reduced proportionally during the period of half-time status, and the tenure clock would run at half-speed as well.
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Yes, of course, parental leave – should definitely have said that rather than just maternity.
And Ancarett, I knew I should have checked with a Canadian before I spouted off with that statistic! Having said that, I still think it’s miles better than what the US has, even if the culture supporting it may not always be in place.
I love the idea of judging tenure on 4-5 pieces rather than everything, and quality over quantity. But I worry that then the concern about publishing in the “right” journals will get even more intense. With the supply/demand problem in the humanities right now, I think any system is going to suffer from the kind of intense competition that’s already in place.
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I recently proposed a plan at my English department that I hope will help with the problem of not having substitute teachers at the college level. I suggested we institute a mentorship program that would assign graduate students to professors who request them. This student would learn to set up syllabi, set goals, grade, and teach a class. Then, the student would work in the writing center, take the required courses, and then, finally, would teach his/her own class as a Graduate Instructor. This program would benefit faculty, like me, a single mom with no back up care for a sick child, when I need to miss a day of class. The student could step in with an assignment. The class would benefit from the continuity of having someone who knows the class and knows the professor’s mode of teaching. The First Year English program (taught almost completely by Graduate Instructors) would get better prepared teachers. And professors, like me, would be able to take a day off in an emergency without simply canceling class. All in all, I think it would benefit everyone. This model might work well elsewhere.
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that’s a terrific idea at schools where you have advanced grad students, Amy, but alas, most colleges don’t. It’s a pretty tough problem here in the master’s level or liberal arts school, and I wish I could figure out a way to solve it.
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Where Is A Good Place To Meet Women
Such \”Twinkie taxes\” are now in place at 7 to 10 percen
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