In the previous post, I explained the obstacles that I faced combining an academic job with kids. I’m not alone.
A recent study found that women with kids are far less likely to get tenure than men with kids. I often get e-mails from other academics who have their own horror stories. It seems that those who have been able to work it out, live in relatively inexpensive areas of the country, have support from other family members, and have access to inexpensive childcare.
Several factors are conspiring to make academia a particularly hostile place for parents. 1) The level of competition for jobs means that universities have no need to accommodate individuals with family responsibilities. 2) Most women don’t finish their dissertations until their mid thirties and don’t secure tenure until their forties. Too late to start a family. 3) The profession is traditionally male, and women don’t feel comfortable asking for a special room to breastfeed or for paid maternity leave. 4) There are no adequate part-time options for parents. Adjuncting doesn’t pay for the babysitter.
Your thoughts?
Apt. 11d 
Two real life examples to discuss (both took place at the my college within the last five years):
Scene One: A department meeting during which we are discussing who will take on responsibilities as undergraduate curriculum coordinator. Candidate G looks the best on paper – came here with a PhD, got tenure last year, wants the job. Single, no children. Several people say that Candidate G is aggressive, opinionated, and quick to speak up – not a team player. Candidate B gets the paperwork in late with the apology that a new baby in the household is making life difficult. Smiles all around the table. Sympathetic comments. Candidate B just finally finished dissertation after many years of procrastination and now has a PhD, but won’t be up for tenure for seven years. No one questions whether or not the new baby will affect B’s ability to do the job; it is understood that the at-home spouse will be shouldering the responsibility of the child. Candidate B is given points for mentioning the baby, though, because this shows that B is sensitive, a people person, someone we want to work with. The job is given to B.
Scene Two: The meeting of a committee who will nominate faculty for position on a desirable, high-powered campus-wide committee that will make an important hiring decision affecting the campus. We are sorting through nominations from departments. Candidates W, X, Y, and Z are given nods of approval with little discussion. Several people mention that W and Y are aggressive and speak up quickly with strong opinions. These observations get smiles and nods of approval. All of these candidates are parents and have either young children or teen-agers at home but their status as parents does not enter the discussion. Candidate F, however, is discussed at length. Candidate F is a highly successful research scientist who recently brought in a grant worth about half a million dollars. Candidate F has an infant and has been using a flexible childcare arrangement that includes the child’s presence on campus several times a day. Candidate F has been known to bring a quietly sleeping infant to department meetings. Certain members of the committee argue that we should not allow Candidate F to sit on an important committee unless we get some kind of guarantee that the infant will not be allowed at meetings. Members of the committee question whether or not Candidate F will have time for the committee and perhaps should be passed over.
Analysis: In one situation, certain personality traits – being assertive, opinionated, willing to speak up – were considered desirable traits. In the other situation, these were considered drawbacks. In one situation, being a parent was a desirable trait because it meant that the person was somehow sensitive, a people person. In the other situation, being a parent was a drawback, and it was acknowledged that the child would probably be a drain on the candidate’s time and energy.
The difference? Candidates G and F are women. The other candidates are men. A single woman who doesn’t have kids, but is assertive, strong-willed, eager to climb the hierarchy – well, she’s a bitch and we don’t want her in a position of power. A man who is assertive, strong-willed, and eager to climb the hierarchy is an ambitious, valuable member of the campus community. A woman who has a child clearly is not going to have time any kind of meaningful work – let’s put her on the Mommy track. A man who has to miss a meeting because he’s got a sick child at home is sensitive, good with people, just a wonderful guy. We all know his wife will be shouldering most of the responsibility for the child.
No woman on the campus would ever dare miss a meeting by saying, “I’ve got a sick child at home.” But a man who does so scores points with his colleagues, both male and female.
Bottom line: Being a parent will not hurt an academic career at all …. unless you happen to be a woman.
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Your points 1-4, above, really hit home for me. And I’m one of the ones who’s worked it out: two kids, a supportive husband, and tenure. My secret? I had my first in grad school! I know that seems not to have worked for you, and I can’t recommend it to everyone, but it really worked for me. I was six months pregnant when I took my orals, wrote my first chapter before she was six months old, and filed when she was almost three. Yes, I took longer to write my diss than I might have otherwise, but I was well-supported in grad school (I’m aware this isn’t always the case) and an extra year just doesn’t really raise any eyebrows, or didn’t then (early 90s) on the way to a humanities PhD. I started my first job when my daughter was almost four (that missing year was a lectureship at my graduate institution, also a great piece of good fortune, I’m aware), and had my second child the year before tenure. On the surface, I’ve got it all.
The costs? Well, for one, my husband’s career. The timing was all wrong for him, and he has just sucked it up. He has patched together a career out of one-year appointments and non-academic positions, including driving a truck at one point. For a while he was Mr. Mom, which was great for me (everyone should have a wife!) but didn’t work at all for him. It’s hard for any ambitious PhD to stay home with kids, I think–harder in our case for a dad in a conservative city where dads generally don’t do that. He had no support for his decision (except from me and the kids) and missed being out in the world terribly.
Second, I had no maternity leave with my second child. He was born in early August and I was back in the classroom in mid-September, after the federally-mandated six weeks. I was brain-dead and sleep-deprived, and my students had had a sub for their first three weeks of school. Not a good combination. I did get one course off that semester (supposedly to do research), but it was still rough, pumping in my office behind a locked door, rushing home as soon as my classes were over, dealing with my daughter’s sleep issues while my son was an infant, etc., etc. That year was hell. And I put together my tenure portfolio at the end of it. Lots of self-doubt that year.
And third, my career has definitely suffered. I haven’t been as productive as I should have, and I’ve switched gears so often it’s hard to remember what I thought I was doing when I started out. Some of this must be my personality, but the constant interruptions of early childhood, just when I was getting my career going, didn’t help. People with more of a killer instinct seem to be able to focus even with rugrats underfoot; I never really could.
Oh, yeah, and that flexible schedule? Means you always feel guilty for what you’re not doing. Not with the kids when you’re in a late afternoon meeting; not working on research when you do cut out an hour early to pick them up from school. Not having a family vacation during that extended summer “break” (ha!) while you work on research; not working on research because you do take a summer vacation. There’s no “time off” from an academic career. I’m at the stage now where I have a lot of service commitments, and I am on campus all day, every day. I don’t ever pick my kids up from school–and I still work nights and weekends.
Still, I am apparently not suited for a desk job, so there’s something to be said for this life. I am committed to it, and my family has been remarkably accommodating.
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ps–I’ve often missed meetings due to child care commitments. I insist on making that work visible to my colleagues. But, again, I have tenure, so it’s “safe” for me to do so. (And I’m a really good departmental citizen, so it doesn’t happen often…)
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A colleague once brought to the Promotion and Tenure Committee some data about gender and careers. According to the study, women in academic careers peak at an older age than do men. A man who has not published a book by the time he is forty is not likely to ever publish. Many women, on the other hand, publish their first book after the age of forty. There are obvious cultural reasons for this difference. My colleague’s point was that hiring committees should take this kind of data into account when making decisions. No one listened to her, of course.
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This discussion reminds me of a meeting I went to as a graduate student where female professors talked about being women in the academy. They said that so many women put off having a baby until they get tenure that they are called “tenure babies.” One woman in the audience said, “what if you don’t get tenure? Does that mean you can’t have a baby?”
It’s not always possible to put pregnancy off to a more convenient time in one’s career, and nothing is guaranteed (tenure or pregnancy), so
I am currently 7 months pregnant and undergoing my third year review. While my school has been accommodating in allowing me to reduce my classload from 3 to 2 classes next semester, I won’t be taking maternity leave because I can’t afford it. If I took the 6 to 12 weeks I am guaranteed by law, I wouldn’t have any classes to teach in the spring (they would adjunct them out) and would have to lose my whole paycheck (after the 6 paid weeks). I can’t afford to cut up rough about this because I am up for third year review.
I will also admit that the first thing I thought when I found out I was pregnant (after Yippee!) was “I hope I don’t end up losing my job because of this.” I’ve read all the Chronicle stories, and I’ve seen what happens to women with children in the academy. I guess I just hope that things will turn out ok for me.
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Not to be a voice of dissent or anti-mom or anything, but reading the posts and comments, I’m sensing a big double standard. On the one hand, a college that takes into account the statistical fact that new moms will have to make more sacrifices than new dads, at the expense of their careers, is biased against women. On the other hand, a college that fails to take into account the statistical fact that women who are less succesful early are likely to become more successful later (because of the first hand, one would assume), is biased against women.
While I have nothing against phonomenological analysis (anecdote) to highlight the individual stories inside a larger problem, are we sure that there is actually a larger problem? Anecdote works best with numbers, and what is missing from the discussion are numbers.
All I know is law, and I don’t know how representative that is, but here’s the new hire numbers at law schools over the past 6 years (1997-2003). I don’t know who had kids or was pregnant at their interviews or what.
Men:
Total: 523
Percent: 54.1%
Women:
Total: 443
Percent: 45.9%
(Source, Table 8B)
Meanwhile, less than 30% of all candidates in the AALS faculty appointment register (182 out of 613) are women. So, in the law, at least, women are getting hired in almost half of all jobs, and disproportionately MORE women are hired as law professors, compared to the number of women applying for those jobs.
I do not doubt that there are individual cases of discrimination against women and mothers, but if there was a systemic bias against them would you see it in the statistics? The problem with academia is that so few people (men or women) get jobs that it’s easy to see conspiracies about who is in and who is out.
As long as the new-hire numbers are essentially even, I will need more than anecdote to believe that there’s a systemic problem.
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RB,
Quite right about the need for statistics over anecdote. Here’s a report on one study of faculty at UC-Berkeley (“Do Babies Matter?”) The authors find a significant “baby gap,” with women who have babies within 5 years of PhD completion much less likely to get tenure than women who don’t have children or who wait until tenure to start families (interestingly, and not surprisingly, they do not find a comparable gap for men).
That’s only one study, of course, and the situation will vary from one field to the next. But I strongly suspect that further and broader statistical studies would demonstrate a similar trend.
The problem is the lack of flexibility. After 5 to 7 years of grad school, and perhaps another 1 to 3 years on the market, the academic has to spend another 5 or 6 years in an all-or-nothing game in order to achieve tenure. As Laura points out, the timing does not work for women with children.
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Thanks, IA for that comment and the link to the Mason study. I’ve been itching to make that point for the past hour, but SOMEBODY wouldn’t go down for his 11:00 nap.
Some other quick points from study:
59% of married women with children indicated they were considering leaving academia. This group was more likely to indicate that their children was the cause of their thoughts of leaving.
They also point out that the difficulties of getting tenure could explain why women with kids dominate the low paying, low status work of adjuncting.
IA, do you want to add some links to previous posts on your blog on these topics?
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re: Question 2, when do men typically complete their post-graduate work and secure tenure? If it is earlier, is it because women are choosing to have children before completing post-graduate work?
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RB:
An additional point: I suspect that hiring for law school faculty positions is handled somewhat differently than much of the rest of academia, with premiums placed on professional experience and the candidate’s own (relatively brief) law school transcript, rather than on long term immersion in the academic pool. Women may be the most attractive candidates, despite there being fewer of them, because of the realities of the professional practice. Ambitious, smart and dedicated as they may be, women lawyers still are leaving traditional law firms in disproportionate numbers. Those departures–I believe–have much to do with the perceived taint that motherhood brings. Women lawyers with kids are going to run into the same issues with regard to partnership track that academics run into with tenure track, it seems to me. It’s a paradox, then, that more top-notch women in law might be inclined to go into faculty positions at law schools for quality of life reasons. Top-notch men, however, are more likely to remain in traditional firms. So, it’s just a blind guess, but I’d wager that, if women are hired disproportionately in law schools, it’s because they’re the cream of the crop of candidates.
I’d also venture that women on partnership track in law firms are quite comparable to women on tenure track in academia; from what I’ve read thus far, the issues seem disturbingly similar.
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I know that I was fortunate to have a very supportive department when I became pregnant on the tenure track. The fact that I was the first woman in the department makes that even more amazing. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my first due date came after the end of exams and my three month maternity leave ended with the start of the new term. I jumped right back into teaching without a pause and, seventeen months later took my first real maternity leave when child number two came along. The department was able to find a contract replacement for my maternity leave but I felt horrible that he was paid only for the exact three months he replaced me. We ended up parachuting into and out of each other’s classes in mid-semester, very disruptive to the students.
Still, when I came up for tenure a short while later, my children were not an issue. Working at a smaller, family-friendly institution has its benefits in that they appreciated my heavy teaching load and administrative duties and were willing to let my conference papers stand in for more substantive research publications.
But I find it interesting how many women hired in academia come with kids, if any, already in tow and as part of a demographic group quite a bit older than the majority of the men, hired right out of their doctoral programs. Two women have been hired in my department since my arrival: one’s my age and the other is several years my senior. I look around at the other departments and I see much the same pattern. Many of these women have, in essence, deferred the early stages of their career by juggling childraising and doctoral studies or postdoctoral work at extremely poor wages. This delayed TT start also hurts their retirement/savings profile.
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Here are a few links to previous discussion on my blog:
“Tenure, Toddlers, and Timing”
“Poll: Academic Identity”
“More on Tenure and Toddlers”
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As I have argued before, most men with kids get chased out of the academy at earlier stages (grad school, early job market) before they ever make it into the men vs. women tenure stats. All the men I knew who had babies in grad school ended up dropping out because they felt the pressure to support their families. I bailed before getting a TT for a similar reason, the desire to start one. Academia is a terrible career for anyone who values family (frequent moving – particularly early in the career, little geographic selection to be near family etc.). But it does abuse women more than men (has anybody seen stats on gender breakdowns of adjuncts?)
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David, I think you’re right to point out how the burdens of academia are felt (unequally, no doubt, but still felt) by both women and men. We had our first child while I was in graduate school, and we’re still hanging on (though no tenure-track job yet). The fellow I was closest to in my graduate program also began his family while he was in graduate school–actually, their first was born the year before he started his Ph.D. program–and he couldn’t make it; he bailed out and took a good government job before he managed to pass his comps. I think we both value family plenty, so what makes the difference between us? Luck, stubborness, passion? (He always could imagine himself doing something besides teaching; I never could.) Some combination of all three?
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While I am tenured now, I had my first child while on a one-year appointment. I was due at the end of March. Like Miranda above, I felt I had no choice but to return immediately after my daughter’s birth, so I returned after two weeks rather than the standard six weeks. In retrospect, I’m not sure that I didn’t have a choice; we have a powerful faculty union. But I have seen other faculty who become pregnant while on short-term appointments not be rehired in subsequent years.
For me, it paid off. I am now tenured at the same institution, and for my second pregnancy I took 10 weeks before the birth (due to twins) and 8 weeks after without an ounce of regret.
But it was very, very hard for me, even though I went back for only 3 or 4 weeks before summer break. But my husband and MIL came with me to school so I could breastfeed between classes. We survived. For years I would see students who had me that semester around campus and they would ask me about my daughter.
By the way, my husband also found having a family and an academic job incompatible. He decided to teach in a private school, because he didn’t want to be in the position of moving around the country. We wanted to have children, have an settled life. He still regrets it, and in my opinion academia is the worse for not having him. He’s working on a book now, so perhaps someday…but the way things are, probably not. You can’t delay entry to academic in the U.S. that way. So men are lost to the profession, as well.
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Data is important.
Several years ago I did a study (published in the University of Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies- 2003) where I examined the faculty maternity leave policies for a random sample of 81 four-year U.S. colleges and universities. One third of the schools I surveyed had illegal maternity leave policies (in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act). And I didn’t even have the time to asses which schools had legal written policies, but weren’t following their own policies. So, the pregnancy discrimination that I found was just the tip of the iceberg of what exists in academia.
Jerry Jacbos (University of Pennsylvania) and Kathleen Gerson use data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Survey of Post-Secondary Faculty and find that women assistant professors work a couple of hours less per week than men, but when they become associate professors, the women work more than the men do. This data is not conclusive, but consistent with the hypothesis that women’s life-time productivity follows a different time pattern than men’s productivity.
Finally, the AAUP collects data on the % of full time men and women faculty at the ranks of Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. For men the % at each rank increases as rank goes up from Assistant to Full. For women the % at each rank increases as rank goes up from Assistant to Full. This pattern has held true for over a decade now. (Earlier data isn’t readily available.) So while women may be hired in proportionate (or disproportionate ) numbers by law schools, in academia as a whole women are not getting promoted and tenured at the rates men do.
Mary Ann Mason and her co-author Marc Goulden (mentioned in a previous post) have data for the Univ. of California System that shows h
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Data is important.
Several years ago I did a study (published in the University of Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies- 2003) where I examined the faculty maternity leave policies for a random sample of 81 four-year U.S. colleges and universities. One third of the schools I surveyed had illegal maternity leave policies (in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act). And I didn’t even have the time to asses which schools had legal written policies, but weren’t following their own policies. So, the pregnancy discrimination that I found was just the tip of the iceberg of what exists in academia.
Jerry Jacbos (University of Pennsylvania) and Kathleen Gerson use data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Survey of Post-Secondary Faculty and find that women assistant professors work a couple of hours less per week than men, but when they become associate professors, the women work more than the men do. This data is not conclusive, but consistent with the hypothesis that women’s life-time productivity follows a different time pattern than men’s productivity.
Finally, the AAUP collects data on the % of full time men and women faculty at the ranks of Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. For men the % at each rank increases as rank goes up from Assistant to Full. For women the % at each rank increases as rank goes up from Assistant to Full. This pattern has held true for over a decade now. (Earlier data isn’t readily available.) So while women may be hired in proportionate (or disproportionate ) numbers by law schools, in academia as a whole women are not getting promoted and tenured at the rates men do.
Mary Ann Mason and her co-author Marc Goulden (mentioned in a previous post) have data for the Univ. of California System that shows how this phenomena of lower promotion rates for women is at least in part due to gender and decision to become a parent.
Finally, women professors just want the same things (in general) that male professors have been fighting for for decades (!) now. Male faculty have fought for retirement benefits, health insurance benefits, tuition benefits, disability insurance, etc. in the years following WWII in order to create a work place that met their needs to combine work and personal life. Women faculty are doing the same thing fighting for maternity leave, parental leave, on campus childcare, etc. The difference is that women’s needs vary significantly from men’s and the academic workplace has been extraordinarily slow (compared to the Coporate Sector) to respond.
Sincerely,
Saranna Thornton
Associate Professor of Economics
Hampden-Sydney College, VA
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Perhaps law is unique, as the majority of professors are coming off just 3 years of school (and sometimes a 1 or 2 year clerkship) and not an 8 or 9 year PhD program.
Nonetheless, the determining factor in almost all tenure track jobs is scholarship production. Do women produce articles and books at a lower rate — perhaps due to their greater family requirements? If so, couldn’t that alone account for the tenure discrepancy? Those are the numbers that I think would be most indicative.
If women are producing identical scholarship, but getting less tenure, that would be clear evidence of a problem. If women are producing less, then the “problem”, if there is one, is in society, not academia.
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My institution has a “maternity leave” policy which is basically temporary disability. It is for pregnancy and birth, so it’s just for women. I didn’t need that because my pregnancy and delivery were uncomplicated, and baby was nicely timed to arrive in late May. By chance. I did take advantage of my institution’s rather generous “parental care leave” … Two semesters of reduced (2/3) teaching load but full salary, and the option of adding a year to my (already too lengthy) tenure clock. The whole package was nicely negotiated with my chair, and I did this during the 3rd year of my tenure-track appointment. I was basically forced into it because there was NO infant care option available to me, anywhere. My partner had no paid parental care option, and was in fact ineligible for Federal Family Leave because his organization is small enough to be exempt. He used about 4 weeks of accrued vacation to help right after birth. Then, I did 13 months of mothering, necessarily multi-tasking to get my p-t paid work done. Basically because I am pushy and I have a private office and reasonably accepting colleagues, I was able to breastfeed without pumping, dragging my infant to my office 3-4 days per week, sometimes to meetings, but never to class. I had a small roster of regular student babysitters (through an on-campus agency) and my partner to take care of my infant during class, and I would do prep and grading either during naps or by staying up late. It was an insane juggle. My research and writing slowed to a crawl, but after that year I was able to rev things up and currently have three publications pending (science papers or review articles) and an large federal grant that supports a full-time assistant. I hope to be ready for tenure in 2-3 years, possibly opting to not even use the extra year on my clock. All of this is hard work, but also a lot of lucky breaks.
BTW, at the time I was pregnant, I was told by a tenured and well-meaning colleague that no woman junior faculty member had ever taken parental leave and then gone on to earn tenure. Many had either quit or been denied. How depressing. On an encouraging note, since then, at least 2 have done so, and conversations with them have been a source of excellent insights and solidarity.
Since I am not yet up for tenure, I do worry about my peers’ perceptions, but I do strive to project an image of “I have it under control” and “My partner is supportive” and “My job comes first.” That’s not that hard, because that is mostly true. (My job ties for first with my family.) It is very tiring and stressful, but I tend to be one to thrive under stress.
Also, I really can’t imagine having another kid any time soon, for both personal and professional reasons. First, my long career track has placed me in this situation at age 41 and it seems that a second child before tenure would be too much and would jeopardize my career situation. Even after that, even throwing in the adoption option, I wonder if a second child is within reach while also keeping a grasp on my sanity.
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I should add that this all happened at an all-women’s college, so you would expect them to be a bit more progressive. And they are. But they could do more. As much as I feel my current situation is working out, which is a lot of luck, I also think that on-site day care for infants and toddlers would have been an enormous boon to me both professionally and for my family’s happiness.
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Academia and parenthood don’t mix at my institution: for starters, the administration pretends we are all childless: our REQUIRED faculty meetings are held at 5 p.m. (daycare closes at 5:30); my Dept. meetings are held at 5 so i always have to cut out early, which makes me look bad. Furthermore, there are lots of receptions at the end of the day–social events–but day care is never provided so the options are not going (which sends the message that I’m not interested in socializing with my colleagues) or bringing kids, which precludes adult conversation and is frowned upon anyway. Beyond insenstive scheduling, we have the impossibility of keeping up with childless colleagues who are able to work every night and weekend and churn out books and articles at a whirlwind pace. Parents have 4 options: be born rich and hire a nanny; marry rich and have a stay at home spouse; work all the time, neglect your kids, but get tenure and then you’ll have time with your kids if they’re not already in college; or spend time with the kids and teaching but don’t do much research or writing and get denied tenure (then you have to find a new job and move your family to a new institution and start working your ass off all over again in the hopes of getting tenure the second time around.) Bottom line is: the tenure system made sense when families had one breadwinner and the other parent took care of the domestic life. In this era, it’s expecting the faculty member to neglect their family and it’s as outdated as the electoral college. Solutions? the european approach: teaching faculty vs research faculty.
Sarah
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To add to the research data offered here:
In “I’ve Worked Very Hard and Slept Very Little: Mothers on the Tenure Track in Academia,” Alice Fothergill and Kathryn Feltey report:
while women constitute 43 percent of all college and university professors, they are only half of the instructors and only 20 percent of the full professors. More telling is the fact that the percentage of all female faculty in tenure track positions declined from 46 percent in 1977 to 32 percent in 1995, while the percentage of female non-tenure track full-time professors and part-time faculty increased from 16 to 18 percent and 38 to 48 percent respectively.
Fothergill and Feltey present evidence that these statistics are due to the chilly climate for mothers in academia. Their research suggests that the profession is still based on a model built around a man who can perform childlessness because he has a wife to care for children and home, and that mothers who have babies early will have a hard time succeeding until it changes.
I guoted this study in a column I write for Literary Mama called “Mothering in the Ivory Tower” at http://www.literarymama.com/columns/motheringintheivorytower/
This most recent column went along with this month’s theme for infertility awareness month–“Desiring Motherhood”–and focuses on my grabbling with issues discussed here. Actually, all my columns address issues discussed here in one form or another (you can find them all archived through links to the left of the page).
As a single mom in academia, and one who left a tenure-track job for family reasons, I can tell you that academia has not been easy for me. I haven’t yet written the column on how the insitution at which I had the tenure track job does not have a maternity leave policy, how I was denied the unpaid maternity leave I did request, how I resigned so I could keep my family living in one place together and care for the miracle child I was not supposed to have and the stepdaugther who was ill, how I applied back for my old job once the family had fallen apart anyway but was discriminated against by supposed feminist faculty in the department who dissed my choice to take the leave in the first place. That column is coming….after I consider all the lawsuit options.
Yet, I have also had excellent experiences as a mother in academia, particularly with my current institution, where I am a visiting assistant professor as I transition back into academic life. The person who does the scheduling came to me to clarify my needs, and carefully set my schedule up so that I would be able to pick up my daughter on time. Older, male colleagues reassure me that they have had to bring children to class with them occasionally. I see children playing in the halls and coming out of private offices. And I have two women colleagues who were tenured with young children. I don’t know if they would treat me differently if this wasn’t my Ph. D. granting institution and they didn’t think of me fondly as one of their own. But I can say that here, I feel supported.
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Academia doesn’t *need* to be family unfriendly.
When I was a grad student/teaching assistant in Belgium, we started with a gender & family group (called “woman and university”, though it was really about the question why there were so few female professors, and how the university could be more friendly for parents).Our first action point was to propose a rule that no meetings should be held after 5 pm. After some negotiation, that became a university-wide rule.
I was the coordinator of this group for two years, and hence did the negotiation with the university president and talked to the press, and in my view the problems are that
(1) male professors, especially old male professors, just like to be in a men’s only club. The absolute majority of them doesn’t give a damn about having more women professors. As with so many professions, more women means less status, and thus they prefer to keep it the old-boy’s club. One or few women is fine, but not too many, please.
(2)sometimes it is argued that you need to work at least 60 hours a week to be a decent researcher, and therefore you need to have your hands free from other obligations. The University president even told me repeatedly that a professor needs someone at home to run the household, as he or she should not have to deal with household management issues. Of course, it is immediately added, this is a gender-neutral rule, and husband and wife should decide who does what. But this is, of course, a joke: someone who makes such a claim doesn’t understand anything about how “gender” works as a system, how it structures societal institutions, but also social and moral norms. And it also denies the existence of discrimination against women in what are considered “masculine” professions, such as academia (anyone who believes this no longer exists, should read Virginia Valian’s _Why so slow? The Advancement of women_, MIT Press, around 1998).
In Belgium, I’ve heard several times that an academic career can only be made if one works full-time, and without serious interruptions. In the Netherlands, I know plenty of people working part time in academia, including many young fathers, and including head of departments. They almost always work 4 days a week – if both parents do this, the child goes to child care three days a week, which is what is seen as OK in the Netherlands (more is generally considered not good for the child, even when child care is high quality).
The price? It’s very hard to do first-rate academic work on 4 days a week. I spent 6 months at Columbia University, and 4 years at Cambridge, and we *are* talking about a different league here. The quality of life of the professors seems much better on continental Europe, but these uiversities do not, in my opinion, reach the level that you find in good US or UK universities. Of course, for parents, it’s much better to have a 4 days a week job at a reasonably good university, then to have the choice between zero or 60 hours a week.
By the way, in the Netherlands, part-time jobs have the same benefits as full-time jobs (pro ratio), but on average the hourly pay is lower (I don’t think this is the case for academia, though).
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I have been scouring the net for information on this topic, and just about 2 weeks ago found the article that the Chronicle for Higher Edu published.
I have a slightly different situation, but I’d like some perspective, if anyone is still checking this site. (I hope that someone will.)
I am finishing up my BS at age 23. I am married and want to start a family before going on to grad school. I want to do research in academia, so I will need my PhD. I have been talking to faculty at my school (a small to medium size university, but not a major research univ, although some research is definitely done), about delaying grad school a couple of years to have a child and the responses have ranged from: “oh, why would you ruin your life like this?” to “well, if you want to do it, do it during grad school (because you won’t go back if you have kids first)”.
My thought process has been this, and please can someone tell me if this is horribly flawed?:
1) I feel like grad school is best used as a time not only to learn but also, very importantly, *to make connections; to network*.
2) Clearly, having babies and wanting to be an academic are seen as incompatible by many people (including, to varying degrees, by women in the dept. who actually have children!!).
3) With the obvious “risk” that I will not go back, doesn’t it make more sense to have them before grad school? I mean, the perception by some faculty seems to be that my idea of starting a family before grad school is foolish and immature. I politely disagree, obviously. But… if anyone ever did look down on me for my decision, if worse came to worse, couldn’t I just say that I made a mistake… that I was young and foolish and didn’t know any better? Isn’t that “mistake” more acceptable at this stage in my career? I mean, obviously, a lot of people see having kids as a “mistake”, and indeed it appears to be one if you want to have the best chance of success in academia (however unfair that might be). So, isn’t it better to make “mistakes” while I’m still such a newbie? Won’t the perception be that I should “know better” by the time I’m actually in grad school, or, even worse, by the time I’m trying to get hired in somewhere?
Given all of this, and being able to accept the fact that I might not go back (although I will do everything in my power to set the stage for going back in a couple of years), does anyone have any thoughts on the plan?
(If it changes anything, I think that I would have one child and go back, and that this would be my only child.)
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I noticed that you posted this quite a few years ago. I wonder what you’ve done to balance career and life. I’m facing a tough decision right now. Babies are young only once. It’s the time that if you won’t get back if you miss it. Therefore I decided to put things on hold for a couple years. On the other hand, I felt upset letting go a book contract from a prestigious press because of my lack of university affiliation…
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Six years later… I have been in and out of academia many times, since I wrote this post, Greentea. I’m currently unemployed. My kids (especially one with special needs) and geographic limitations have severely reduced my opportunities to find an academic job. (It’s also just a crappy job market right now, and everybody is having a hard time getting a job.)
Like you, I had to let some great opportunities go by. Sometimes I get a bitter about how things worked out. But the bitter moments happen very rarely right now. I have too much to be grateful for to allow myself to get angry. I am in the process of redefining “success,” and it’s made me a much happier human being.
Please don’t let my particular circumstances impact on your decisions.
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