Abstract
According to the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) Diversity Report 2013, which uses data from 2007 to 2013, 34% of faculty members in NASPAA accredited programs were female and 66% were male. Although these numbers are up significantly from 2000 (12% female and 88% male faculty members), there are still obstacles for women in higher education. One of these is the balancing being a successful academic and a parent. Two new books address just this issue.
The books Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia written by Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee and Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower written by Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden both talk about the challenges that women who pursue careers in academia and have a family face throughout their careers. The most noticeable difference between the two books is that they approach the solution to the challenges of work–family balance in academia in different ways. While noting the need for universities to adopt more family-friendly policies, Connelly and Ghodsee focus instead on providing a variety of concrete strategies for individuals—especially women—who pursue academic careers and want to have children. In contrast, Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden focus on exploring the options available for universities to create a family-friendly work environment for faculty members and graduate students. In addition, Professor Mommy is in many ways specific to the humanities and social sciences and largely relies on normative approach, whereas Do Babies Matter focuses more on the natural sciences and uses an empirical, quantitative approach.
Professor Mommy and Do Babies Matter contribute to the ongoing discussion of the work/family balance of mothers with doctoral degrees that begun by texts such as Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (2008) by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant and Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out (2010) by Emily Monosson. In comparison, Professor Mommy contains more positive messages for young scholars who want to have children than do the other two books. Connelly and Ghodsee’s overall idea is that women can become successful professors and mothers even in the current (not so family-friendly) institutional environment because there are women who have done it and “have it all” like themselves. This idea is consistent with Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) advice for young women to Lean In. Both the book Lean In and Professor Mommy are realistic and practical how-to books for women with career ambitions but both give the impression that institutional changes are not always necessary for women to balance work and family life. Nevertheless, Professor Mommy would be engaging and practical to read for graduate students and young scholars on the tenure track who lack time as well as power to change the culture of their institutions. Do Babies Matter, however, puts more emphasis on institutional changes than on individual women’s actions.
Professor Mommy began by introducing nine myths—“not-so-pretty truths”—about academia and motherhood. In brief, an academic job is a flexible but demanding full-time job which requires considerable time and effort for researching, attending academic conferences, teaching, and servicing—depending on the type of university. Raising a family is also a full-time job, including the endless child care and household duties. Like many other professions, therefore, it is not easy for academics, especially for “professor mommies,” to balance between work and family life, although the flexibility in managing one’s own schedule could be quite an advantage. Nevertheless, the authors are optimistic about successfully combining an academic career with a family—maybe because they have done it themselves—if women (or could be men) know exactly what they want and what their institutions expect from them, are aware of the personal sacrifices required to become successful academics, and find realistic strategies to get tenure and ultimately promoted to full professor.
As they mentioned in the introduction, Connelly and Ghodsee are “brutally honest” about the challenges of becoming a successful professor and a mother and provide very specific and realistic advices that are practical for not only to-be-“professor mommies” but whomever wants to pursue a position in the professoriate. In particular, their description of four different types of higher education institutions and their advice for figuring out the requirements that a particular institution has for professional success could be useful for all doctoral students and post-docs seeking a tenure-track job. Furthermore, advice, such as the following, could be a great comfort to women in academia who are living a “frantic juggling lifestyle” and must balance academic and family life.
You cannot be everything to everyone all at the same time—a super-scholar, a super-teacher, and a super-mother. However, you can be a well-respected scholar, a good and conscientious teacher, and a loving and attentive mother. That needs to be good enough. (p. 61)
Although it contains a number of useful pieces of advice for mothers on the traditional academic career path, some parts of the book, Professor Mommy, seem to turn generalizations of the authors’ own life lessons into advice for every academic woman. This is partly because, as the authors acknowledged, they have not been able to get as many survey responses as they wanted from busy academic mothers who are indeed behaving in the ways that Connelly and Ghodsee advised in their book: Saying no to the things that do not directly contribute to their career success. Nonetheless, this book could have captured the attention of a wider circle of readers by soliciting more diverse viewpoints from other mothers in academia, particularly from those in the natural science fields. In addition, the book would be more informative had the authors used recent data or done some research on the current status of family-friendly policies in different types of higher education institutions. The book Do Babies Matter in some ways picks up where Professor Mommy has left off.
According to a wide variety of data presented in the book Do Babies Matter, women are still less likely than men to get tenure-track jobs and also to actually get tenure, despite the fact that about half of all doctoral students in the United States are women. In addition, among tenure-track/tenured faculty members, women are less likely than men to be married and have children, and more likely to be divorced. Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden point out that this gender disparity in academia may not be due to discrimination toward women in general or differential socialization between men and women but due more to the reality that an academic job is incompatible with marriage and having children. The situation is even worse for female graduate students and assistant professors in the natural science fields where men still hold the majority of faculty and administrative positions.
To address the problems associated with gender disparity in academia, the authors recommend universities to adopt family-friendly policies such as “stop the clock policies for tenure and promotion decisions” and “emergency child care” for all faculty members and graduate students, regardless of their gender, to successfully balance their academic and family life and reach their full potential. In comparison with Professor Mommy, Do Babies Matter talks about the ways that universities as institutions can change toward a more family-friendly work environment, instead of providing specific advice to individuals in academia who want to become successful professors and parents. The authors do a great job at describing the pros and cons of different types of family-friendly policies available for mothers—and fathers, in some cases—in academia.
Professor Mommy and Do Babies Matter have different approaches and solutions to the same problem: Women lag behind men in the academic world. Sheryl Sandberg suggests “making your partner a true partner,” which implies that men should also play a fair role in child caring. This is why some companies such as Goldman Sachs and Netflix are offering more generous paid paternity leaves and why fatherhood in academia is a topic which warrants more discussion in books such as Professor Mommy and Do Babies Matter—although the latter seems to talk more about men than does the former. Overall, both books will be welcome reads by their intended audiences and keep a necessary conversation going about an important topic which affects the lives of many academics, regardless of gender—the balance between work and family.