There are a lot of interesting stories and articles that have come out this week that I hope to get to at some point but am too busy at the moment to address. But in honor of the conclusion of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, I will comment briefly on this American Scientist article by Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci titled, “When Scientists Choose Motherhood.”
It is when academic scientists choose to be mothers that their real problems start. Women deal with all the other challenges of being academic scientists as well as men do. Childless women are paid, promoted and rewarded equivalently to their male peers (and in some analyses at even higher rates). Children completely change the landscape for women—but do not appear to have the same effect on the careers of men. What happens when children enter the equation, and why does this change seem to impact women’s but not men’s careers?
Despite being at an institution unabashedly and unapologetically focused on issues of female rights, the above issues are present here at Wellesley. The decision to have children has a net detrimental effect on tenure, promotion and compensation. Not nearly as bad as at many, and possibly most, academic institutions, but not perfect. There are a number of interesting discussions that can be had around this issue, and the linked article does a nice job of outlining many of them.
In its conclusion, the article talks about some potential solutions, or at least responses, to this problem.
Further strategies include not penalizing older or nontraditional applicants for jobs; leveraging technology to enable parents to work from home while children are young or ill; providing parental leaves for primary caregivers of either gender and offering funding to foster successful reentry; and providing an academic role for women who have left professional positions to have children. Institutions could also try stopping tenure clocks for primary caregivers during family formation; adjusting the length of time allocated for work on grants to accommodate childrearing; offering no-cost grant extensions; providing supplements to hire postdocs to maintain labs during family leave; reducing teaching loads for parents of newborns; providing grants for retooling after parental leave; hiring couples; offering child care during professional meetings; providing high-quality university-based child care and emergency backup care; and instructing hiring committees to ignore family-related gaps in curricula vitae.
In my view, there is no singular solution, but rather a need to think of traditional institutional practices and structures far more flexibility and recognize the this flexibility has value. I often find myself encountering notions of what a College or University “should be,” rather than the more useful question of “does this make the institution work better and serve students better?” Should children be in your office? Probably not all day, but it certainly makes life easier for parents with young children if they can hang out there periodically for a little while to allow for the realities of complex schedules and working parents. Should Colleges/Universities provide additional resources to help faculty stay active around parental leaves? It might seem like institutions that do so are spending money on nothing, but there is real value in curricular continuity associated with keeping a faculty member and not having to put the time and resources into hiring processes. Institutional flexibility does not necessarily need to mean problematically ad hoc solutions to every individual case; they can mean simply recognizing value in higher order visions of institutional structure.
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1. Williams, W.M. and Ceci, Stephen J. (2012) “When Scientists Choose Motherhood.” American Scientist 100(2):138. DOI: 10.1511/2012.95.138
