Successful Academic Newsletter

Thanks to Larry…

I’m glad that Summers rammed his foot in his mouth because I learned so much.

Thanks to his offensive comments, I learned about MentorNet; a program for women in engineering and sciences that helps hook them up with academic mentors. It is a useful organization and one that helped lead the publicity campaign against Summers.

I’ve also been learning more about research on early gender differences.

In one study, scientists at Cambridge University, in England, measured how long 1-day-old infants looked at different objects. They found that boys tended to gaze at three-dimensional mobiles longer than girls did, while girls looked at human faces longer than boys did.

In tests of 1-year-old babies, boys liked to watch videos of cars with moving wiper blades more than videos of faces, while girls preferred the opposite. (I read about these studies in a March 4th Chronicle article by Rich Monastersky.)

Aren’t these findings interesting?

Do any of you conduct research on gender differences? If so, let me know. I’d love to learn more.

Babies on the Tenure Track

Well, the justifiable tizzy over the comments of Harvard President Lawrence Summers is still percolating. A couple of weeks ago, the professors at Harvard took an unprecedented step: a vote of no confidence. Of course, Larry has no plan to step down, despite the disapproval of his faculty.

Personally, I’ve been pleased that he made his wildly impolitic comments that women were unfit for engineering and science.

Why am I pleased? Because he made overt the lurking attitudes that I hear complaints about from the women I coach and teach. Under the sheen of political correctness, much sexism is now subterranean. Is prejudice more insidious when hidden? I don’t know. But certainly the issues Summers raised should be debated and the inequalities addressed.

How childbearing will affect academic careers is certainly on the minds of my friends, students and clients.

Last week I gave four presentations to graduate students at the University of Michigan. After my talks, when students had the opportunity to ask questions privately, two women asked whether I thought they should delay having children until after finishing their doctoral degrees.

Another woman who had recently had a baby asked me whether I thought that she could still pursue a tenure-track career.

I hear these concerns from women academics frequently. Should they delay childbearing until a particular point in their career? My answer is usually “No.”

The time between beginning a doctoral career and getting tenure is too long to delay the pursuit of central ideals. I don’t think that any of us should seek a “perfect” time to have a child, seek a life partner, stay in shape, develop a spiritual practice, get involved in community service, travel to dreamed-of locations, take political action, or pursue any other major life goals.

Will a single-minded focus on scholarly publishing make tenure more likely? Of course. Is it worth it? Probably not.

It is probably true that having a child makes it more difficult to finish a dissertation or publish peer-reviewed papers. Unfortunately, the career costs are still born disproportionately by mothers (pun intended): according to one study quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, women who’ve had babies within 5 years of getting their Ph.D. are 38% less likely to receive tenure within 12-14 years than men who’ve become fathers during the same time frame.

Despite the challenges of juggling work with having a baby, I think that graduate school is a comparatively good time to become a parent. In general, working part-time or taking a significant amount of time off is more feasible during graduate school than later in your career. As I told the new mother at UM, “enjoy this precious time with your infant. Try not to feel guilty if it takes you a year longer to finish your dissertation.”

For graduate student parents, the greatest difficulty is usually money. Financial pressures on graduate students are harsh, and worsening, without adding the costs of raising a child.

Money worries ease (at least slightly) for junior faculty but time demands are even more intense. Still, I don’t think that women should feel forced to choose between children and their career.

Given the multi-faceted pressures placed on new professors, I’ve been impressed by how many women successfully juggle childrearing and the quest for tenure.

The now-tenured mothers I know have had many things in common. These factors include:

The tenure-track fathers I know also have a challenging juggling act to perform, since the men I work with feel personally committed, and morally obligated, to play a significant role in raising their children. They are doing a lot more with their children and around the house than their fathers or their friends.

Another sign of progress, I believe, is the decreasing level of stigma (at least in liberal academic circles) associated with those who eschew typical nuclear family constellations. I’ve worked with many academics – both single and partnered – who’ve made the conscious decision to remain childfree. Bravo to those pioneers who say that there are many non-parental paths to a generative life.

As you can tell, despite the ongoing blows inflicted by the current political administration, I am an optimist. I think that the lot of women in academia is improving – albeit slowly and unsteadily. According to a report put out by Yale graduate students, in the Ivy Leagues in 2003, only 20% of tenured faculty were women. But this proportion was up from 14% in 1993.

Much more needs to be done: in the Ivy League, of 433 new tenure track jobs 150 went to women. That number should have been well over 200.

Let’s work even harder. (But, President Summers, let’s not work 80 hours a week -- on anything.)