Women in Academia

~ Laura

In this month’s Perspectives on Politics (for APSA geeks only), Monroe et al. look at gender inequality in academia. They describe the problems that women academics face in gaining top tier positions at research universities.

Their sample includes women from all disciplines, not just political
science. Since some departments, such as nursing and education, have an
over-represenation of women, their findings aren’t nearly bad enough.
For example, they found that while 44% of women are awarded degrees,
38% have full time positions. You take out the education and nursing
people, and things would get even worse. I would have loved to see
those numbers in political science.

Other of their findings are not very surprising to those of us who
have been hashing this out on the blogosphere for ages, but still it’s
good to get it out there. They write:

One
of the most striking findings from our interviews was the intractable
tension between professional success and family duties. For the
laboratory or bench sciences, Larry Summers properly identified a real
problem but missed the critical explanatory variable. It is not gender
that imposes limits on women’s professional success. It is children,
family, and domestic duties. The relationship between familial
responsibilities and gender discrimination is a subtle one, in part
because the gender role models that society imposes are so deeply
ingrained they often become confounded with biology. Childbirth and
breast-feeding are, of course, biologically based, but they occupy
relatively short periods in the overall span of a woman’s professional
life. Child-rearing and child-care, by contrast, represent vast
investments of time and effort that have no biological requirements,
but are traditionally constructed as responsibilities of women.
Further, there is no clear biological reason why care of
elderly family members is a female responsibility. In this regard,
then, the conflict of family and career is centrally a social issue, potentially
as constraining on men as on women, but in practice resting largely on
female shoulders. Not one woman in our sample said gender in and of
itself limits women’s potential to do top work in science and academia;
the “problem” is socially constructed.

Through
the gossip mill, I have heard that some universities are offering men a
year off the tenure clock for paternity leave. The trouble is that
women use that year to actually raise the children, while the men use
that year to do research and have a leg up during the tenure review
process.

UPDATE: Some old posts on this topic: here, here, and a pile here.

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Women in Academia”

  1. I think my school offered that year to men. Either way you go, you have issues. Offering to hold the clock for men advantages those who don’t actually intend to take the leave, but not offering it men puts a huge block in the way of any man who does want to take on more family responsibilities.

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  2. I think many universities offer the year off the clock to men as well as women. Not doing so would reinforce the social construct of gender segregation (if a mother, but not a father could get a extension, then a family would have no choice but to have the mother take the main responsibility for the children).
    I think it’s a trap to assume that child-bearing itself is short lived, though. It’s true that in a lifetime it is. But, if you have a couple of kids and breastfeed them, you’re taking a 4 year biological hit (which will vary in degree of effect for different women).
    bj

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  3. We shouldn’t generalize too much. My university provides a semester off for men or women, plus the option to turn off the tenure clock. I stayed home and worked only at naptimes, and I know male colleagues who have done the same. It can perhaps be abused, but I haven’t seen it.

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  5. Well, breastfeeding as sole nourishment isn’t a 2-year process. For a few it’s a one year process. More often, it’s a 6-to-9 month process. And for babies with grandmother-babysitters from a different era who think babies should be fed cereal as soon as possible to help them “sleep” longer, it’s even shorter. Uh, speaking hypothetically.

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  8. Laura, didn’t think you were taking men down with that comment. I’ve heard one (single, untenured) man make that complaint about another man who just became a father (though I don’t know how the father used his leave). I just think the whole area is a confusing mess, and not just in academia.

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  11. My university gave me a semester off, then my husband a semester off, after the birth of our second child in October. So this is becoming more and more common, and thank God for it. But, believe me. He is not getting any “leg up” in the tenure process out of the deal (there’s a kind of weird, vaguely sexist assumption woven in there, BTW). He would kill to be using that time to “do research”. That’s a fantasy. He’s a full-time dad, and that’s all he has time for now that I am back teaching this semester. But nevertheless, I find two problems with the above. The first is that one of the great surprises of becoming a mother was that my assumption that because I have a fully supportive and fully participatory husband the job of child rearing would be 50-50. It turns out, and I was truly dumfounded by this (maybe I’m naive, but I was)…despite his being with our children all day and being as fully engaged as a father can possibly be short of breast feeding, those kids still prefer their mother. This is understandably frustrating for me, and my husband especially, poor guy!! So it’s not entirely a cultural or social construction that we could just obliterate had we the will. There is something biological in there, something that I never expected, whether it’s the carrying the baby in the womb aspect and some primordial memory of that the child has, or the breast feeding, or the softer voice and non-scratchy cheeks, I really have no idea. I’m as baffled by it as anyone else, but let me tell you, it is real, much to BOTH my husband’s and my chagrin. Those kids just want their mama. Not sure what any institution, no matter how much good will, can really do about that. Sigh…

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