Part-Time Mothering: A Poetic Autoethnography of a Precariously Employed Academic’s Mothering Experiences

Past literature has highlighted significant gender differences in academia with women being able to publish less, struggling more to reach higher positions, and being more likely to have interrupted careers (Minello et al., 2021). In India, women’s enrollment rate in higher education stood at 48.7% and they also constituted 42.9% of the teaching positions in colleges (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2021). While these numbers look promising, the same survey also highlights that women’s participation drops to 37.8% at the University teaching level. Women researchers constitute only 16.6% of those engaged in research and development activities (PIB, 2021). Work–family conflict, with competing pressures of marriage, and family responsibilities are often used to explain the phenomenon of the glass ceiling effect and the “sticky floors” that constrict promotions (CohenMiller, 2020).

Work may become challenging due to parenthood for both mothers and fathers but mothers are more likely to experience stereotypes and constraining structures. This includes the pressure to continue as ideal workers to fight against the negative stereotypes about mothers’ lack of commitment to paid work (Glauber, 2018). As compared with their male counterparts, mothers of young children are 35% less likely to have tenure-track positions (Mason et al., 2013). The issues around maternal and childcare leave; managing teaching, administrative, and research workload; balancing childcare while working; negotiating travel for fieldwork and conferences, career stability, and progression, that adversely impact academic mothers take on more challenging tones for academic mothers who are also precariously employed (Mavin & Yusupova, 2020). In the present study, I use poetic autoethnography as a tool to discuss my experiences of mothering, in the context of my emotional journey and my subjectivities as a precariously employed academic in a premier higher educational institution in India.

The present text draws inspiration from the idea of “messy texts” (Marcus, 1994), which distances itself from the science–literature dichotomies, striving to portray the “messy” realities of human experiences. As typographically non-linear texts, they are comfortable breaking the rules of conventional scientific writing to represent everyday voices and stories of individuals’ experiences. The inquirer finds new ways of communicating not just as social scientists, but also as storytellers and poets, narrating experiences of human beings rather than subjects.

I became a mother in my fourth year as a precariously employed academic in a higher educational institution in India. I had still not started my doctorate. This was my third job after completing a master’s degree in psychology, and a job I still find quite precious. It was precious because it was not an easy job to have or keep.

When I started teaching in 2016, there was a clear distinction between the employees along the lines of the core–periphery model (Atkinson, 1984). Core employees in the University setting are employees with permanent contracts, which affords them a greater say in decision-making, and more autonomy concerning the courses they want to teach and when they want to teach it. On the contrary, a large number of young academics are routinely hired as peripheral employees—the ‘ad-hocs’—short-term appointments made for a particular purpose or need. The precariously employed “ad-hocs” would move from one college to another with their curriculum vita and certificates, at the beginning of each teaching semester for interviews that would allow them to have a job for one semester, or in some favorable cases for an entire academic year. Since these jobs have contractual uncertainty, fewer rights, and power hierarchies ingrained in their structure, employees in this position often find themselves in economically and socially vulnerable positions, despite their educational qualifications (Benach et al., 2014).

My job teaching undergraduate students at a prestigious educational institution, however, is still precious to me. I have been in the same institution for seven years now. My job has also catered to my fundamental psychological needs of feeling competent, autonomous, and experiencing a sense of relatedness to others (Deci & Ryan, 2012). Since I was a child, my relationship with books and my scholastic achievements defined my identity. And this job helped me carry on with that sense of competence. At the end of every class, I experienced a sense of achievement. I was able to make concepts clear for my students; I had the privilege to discuss theories, principles, and concepts which have real-life applications in my classrooms; and I was able to make fear-inducing statistical concepts more enjoyable with examples. I chose my profession and I could choose how I wanted to teach something. While a uniform curriculum guides teachers across the University, I had the freedom to design my classes and tutorials. I also work with a great team, predominantly females who look out for each other. My pregnancy was filled with kindness and affection from my colleagues—from unexpected greeting cards and books to prepare me for my journey of motherhood to frequent inquiries about what they could do to make my day easier. I worked till my last week of pregnancy, with joy, as my workplace made me feel joyous.

The same job was experienced quite differently once my child arrived. I no longer wanted to joke about returning to work the day after delivering the baby. The differences between the reality of my job and that of me being a mother emerged quite strongly and dichotomously. I questioned the autonomy my job offered me. I did not have the autonomy to avail maternity leave, a provision that provides first-time and second-time mothers a 26-week leave period in my country. While thankfully, a court case in February 2020 mandated this leave, even for precariously employed academics at the university employing me, this was not a provision available when I needed the same. Instead, I relied on the compassion shown by my head of the institution, in granting me a month-long leave. I lived in a state of confusion and disorientation. As a precariously employed academic, I am perhaps easily dispensable. My child has only one mother to take care of him. Do I continue with my job? What reasons could potentially justify leaving my one-month-old child at home while I pursue a job that wasn’t stable enough, real enough? How do I experience a sense of competence at work when I can’t shake away feelings of being a failure as a mother for not being able to be there with them on days, they need me biologically to sustain themself? These challenging questions kept me awake as I felt lonelier than I had felt in the last few years. A look at the statistics for female labor force participation would have perhaps made me feel less alone.

In India, the female labor force participation rate (LFPR) as assessed in 2021–2022 is at 32.8% overall. For urban areas, the percentage drops to a paltry 23.8% owing perhaps to social mobility (Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2023). Inadequate maternity leave policies and unsatisfactory execution of the same would likely influence these numbers adversely. Evidence links maternity leave benefits with an increase in women’s income and length of stay in the labor force (Budig et al., 2016). Furthermore, a recent review of the literature on maternity leave benefits highlights the positive impact of maternity leave on the mental and physical health of both mother and children and an increase in the duration of breastfeeding (Van Niel et al., 2020). Maternity leave benefits also are related to better economic outcomes for females (Heymann et al., 2017), on-time immunizations for children (Berger et al., 2005; Ueda et al., 2014), and better investment in children’s health and education (Quisumbing & Maluccio, 2000). For mothers without earning partners and a family to depend upon for taking care of the child while they are away at work, paid maternity leave becomes the only support for them to mother their children, while also holding on to their jobs.

The idea of the “leaking pipeline” for women in academia also can be called into context here. The metaphor captures the phenomena of women in academia dwindling in number through the various stages of career progression. Pell (1996) explains, in the context of American Universities, that while 40% of people who receive their undergraduate degrees are women, they comprise only 22% of the University faculty. Furthermore, only 8% of them go on to become full professors.

While academia, in general, offers challenging possibilities for work–life balance, being a female academic in largely patriarchal systems accentuates those challenges due to career and family conflicts, wherein motherhood is looked at primarily as women’s responsibility. As such, balancing work and children, especially young ones, becomes difficult. Caplan (1993) speaks of how biological and tenure clocks click together, and women experience the pressure of choosing between the two. In the absence of job security, clearly formulated maternity leaves, and work that fills to take up a large share of your time, precariously employed academics many times choose not to take on mothering roles, or delay the same till they either attain the said job security through permanent appointments (Bozzon et al., 2017; Schmitt, 2021).

In this article, I weave my experiences as an early-career, precariously employed academic, and a mother through poetic autoethnography. Faulkner (2017) writes about how poetry is a form of visionary activism, social justice, and feminist and theoretical practice. It allows one to communicate about the universal by articulating personal subjectivities in a manner that usual academic writing does not allow. When I started on this project, I began with a reflexive essay which made me feel vulnerable, and almost unable to recount my experiences without the pressure of neatly delivering my experiences as an academic output. Writing my experiences in the form of poetry allows me to have a conversation that I may not be able to have otherwise. I also agree with Chang (2018) when she writes that poetry is a time machine. Poetry allowed me to navigate through the past, the present, and also imagine a future of this experienced journey. Furthermore, as Reed (2013, as in Faulkner, 2018) points out, poetry is a feminist practice that challenges the dichotomies of both the emotion and the intellect, and that of the public and the private, allowing me to highlight how my motherhood is influenced by my positioning as a precariously employed academic.

These experiences span from late November 2019 through the COVID-19 period, to the post-pandemic today. As a working mother, the duration was marked by a brief leave after delivering my child, leaving a month-old child to go to work, working from home during the pandemic, and going back to in-person classes after the COVID-19 situation improved slightly in the city where my college is located. The work resides within a context of economic logistics, power dynamics, and social norms around mothering.