Not 'news' to anyone here, I know, but scary article about motherhood and academia

I repeat, wanting to see your own children sometimes is NOT the definition of a sexist marriage!

So we are saying because academia is so utterly badly paid you cannot even afford a live in au pair at £60 a week or 3 hours after school care at £10 a hour in the week

According to a quick google, research council PhD stipends in the UK are £13,726 pa (tax free), which is a good guess as to what the average PhD student lives on. The average postdoc salary in in the range £23,475 - £35,254. So, with a PhD and 2x2 year postdocs, you will get to around 30 years of age on a salary that's not great, probably have no savings because you'll have had some period of self-funding and had to cover early years childcare and other expenses such as travel that you didn't get university funding for. Plus the best universities tend to be in expensive cities so your salary doesn't go as far as it might if you had freedom over where you live.

So yes, a live-in au pair or £150 a week on wrap around care can be hard to cover.

and because these women are in very unequal marriages where the man insists if anyone collects children from school it must be the woman

Not necessarily, most academic couples I know share duties. e.g. my DH and I split pick-up and drop-off, although our DD is only 2 so is at nursery all day long and we don't have to deal with early school finishes. This week, in fact, the nursery rang to say that DD was ill. I had a meeting scheduled so DH took the afternoon off. Even so, having to deal with half of the childcare stuff can be a hinderance (but I think academia offers a lot of flexibility to deal with this - one thing in its favour!)

that is why these women find it hard and because they married men who earned very little too?

I think this is a big problem for female academics, who often marry male academics. Male academics are often married to women who are prepared to stay home and do the domestic stuff.

Is Xenia reminding anyone else of Marie Antoinette?

To have an au pair, one would have to have a spare room.

DH and I can afford wrap around care, but there are several issues involved in finding decent after school care round here that is not entirely full. One of the after school clubs is dangerously bad (real safeguarding issues) and the others are very hard to get places in. There isn't much choice in the way of childminders either. This is what will make it tricky for us.

The student holidays at university do not in any way reflect the staff holiday entitlement. We've got the same kind of AL as you Xenia. Except that most academics never take their AL because they're too busy writing grant applications or papers that they don't get time to do when they're officially a work, or marking 100s of exam scripts over chistmas/new year. Or they drag their family on fieldwork 'holidays'. Or you have to go to bloody conferences, which cost a fortune (and the university doesn't pay). Not doing all of the above kills off your promotion prospects very rapidly, and usually sees you ever more loaded with teaching and admin responsibilities (to free up research time for those who have done all hose things).

Academics do not take 3 months off in the summer.

If you are an academic you don't just teach at a university - you do your own research too. You will either be on fixed-term contracts or seeking your own funding, and you won't get another contract or more funding unless you produce the right output.

The hours may be flexible but most people I know who work in academic research work more hours in total and take fewer holidays and are more likely to work at weekends than everyone else.

Xenia - I am employed by the medical research council to do research. Not by the university. We do not get holidays off!

No more from me as I am beginning to suspect I may on fact be in labour at bloody last

Someone else explain please. We are going out to play.

university holidays

So we are saying because academia is so utterly badly paid you cannot even afford a live in au pair at £60 a week or 3 hours after school care at £10 a hour in the week and because these women are in very unequal marriages where the man insists if anyone collects children from school it must be the woman that is why these women find it hard and because they married men who earned very little too?

There are university holidays. I would have thought that academics do have a bit more holiday than most of us who work in the City etc. Are we saying it is low pay plus a sexist and low paid husband is the reason that female academics find full time work once children are at full time school is hard?

Childcare will be harder for us once DS2 goes to school. We don't have any family within 100 miles of us and finding decent after school care with spaces is tough. The worst bit is going to be the part-time easing in to reception nonsense in September. He's been in FT nursery for years; the school day is going to seem short to him as it is.

It's easy to sit there and say 'I did it, so you should be able to too', but other people have different circumstances to deal with.

It may for a very short period when the chidlren are under 5 very hard work for both to work full time but it's dead easy once children get a bit bigger

I think someone already mentioned that they found what I did - both working ft was fine when the children were under 5 but actually became harder/impossible at schoolage - the school day is short and there's the school run to deal with. Academics - at the ages when they have small kids - generally aren't on the sort of wage which allows for wraparound child care of schoolage kids, and they generally will have left their hometown and not have a supply of helpful grandparents/relatives to fill the gap. 'Dead easy' may have been your experience, xenia, in whatever field it is you work in but I doubt it applies to many academics (and many others)

Xenia I don't disagree with you that huge numbers of successful women cite an equal marriage as key to success. I tend to think of it something like this. Suppose there are 100 ambitious women who, in an ideal world, are destined for success. Split them into 3 categories:

• 10 don't get married, and maybe 5 of these succeed in their ambition
• 30 get married and manage to maintain an equal partnership without stepping back, 15 of whom make it to the top
• the remaining 60 get married and find themselves in an unequal marriage, step back when they have kids etc, very few will succeed, maybe 2-3

Those women who have an unequal marriage will almost certainly struggle to get on. Convincing those 60 women not to stand for sexism will obviously have a huge impact on the success of women in general, and so I think your message is definitely important.

Of the women who do succeed, a large number will cite an equal partnership as a key factor in their success simply by virtue of the numbers.

But what about the remaining 20 women, who have an equal marriage (or none)? Do you have any insight into reasons why they might not succeed in their ambitions?

It seems to me that you can only make it to the top if you have an equal partnership, but having an equal partnership is no guarantee that you will. Though I'd bet that if you took a comparable group of 100 ambitious men, many more than 50% of them would succeed. So there are other structural biases, some of which are specific to academia, that come into play.

I still think if women insist their partner play a full equal role (I was married for 19 years) it is the secret. Huge numbers of very successful women mention this as the key. if you take on the wife work more fool you. Perhaps girls need assertiveness and feminism training and men a kick up the bottom at home. If the man does not do the domestic task which is his - my children's father did 100% of the washing at one stage for example, not help me, did all of it as plenty of other fathers do, you just don't do it for that person. Don't enable the sexism at home.

It may for a very short period when the chidlren are under 5 very hard work for both to work full time but it's dead easy once children get a bit bigger and you had 30 years of high paid working life to come so worth the few hard years.

The worst thing is, the same kind of behaviour is also found in some female university professors.

Stupid typos.

The thing I dislike about academia, now I'm out of it, is that they believe they are so damn saintly. It is full of sexist blokes who, because they are broadly left-leaning, genuinely believe they are far less sexist than anyone in any career ever and hence if you dare draw attention to it you will be squashed like a mosquito.

Yyyyy to this. This, for me, turned out to be the real headfuck.

I'm not a fully-fledged academic - doing a pt PhD, working in university admin, doing some teaching. Was in a tiny academic centre, not enough staff to accompany students on field trip, so I volunteered to go though it wasn't not part of my job description (I did have the necessary subject & regional knowledge). Was later told I wasn't needed, fine. A male colleague who did have it as part of his description pulled out at the last minute for no good reason - didn't want to do it.

Which of us was reprimanded by the centre director? Why, me, of course. He said he decided not to send me due to my lack of enthusiasm. Although I'd volunteered. He put the enthusiasm down to having a child. Understandable, of course, but counted against me in perpetuity. And not a word breathed against the male colleague who didn't go, who just happened to have worked with the director for years in a previous year (major, major issues with nepotism in recruitment).

Just one minor anecdote, nothing to compare with the serious structural issues you're all identifying. But it still makes me rage against the injustice of it. It was symptomatic of my treatment by an individual who considers himself a leading expert in ethics and equality. I would genuinely prefer if he was an unrepentent old sexist rather than someone who urged students on the merits of critical self-reflection while managing to be completely and utterly blind to all forms of male privilege.

I suspect that the male professors (and they are overwhelmingly male) that aren't pulling their weight teaching-wise. Another problem is that several of them use their grant money to buy out heir teaching. But you don't get another lecturer to replace them. No. You get a postgrad who will run a sort of workshop so long as you provide all the materials for them (seriously, I have to make all the student prep materials, put them on the VLE, provide them with power points and activities for the class and brief them on it, etc). So you end up with extra teaching and it's in someone else's workload model. I am not accepting any buy out on my modules in future. If I'm not getting an actual lecturer, then I'm claiming the hours myself and I'll bloody teach the classes myself. The problem is though, the professors all need the hours they're buying out on their workload and they're more powerful than me.

Ours are all public too - it was found that male professors were doing hardly any teaching and it was all being picked up by the women, so now everyhing is much more transparent. It is such a shame there is no Athena swan for the humanities

Not as far as I know. But we're not STEM. Tbh, I'm going to have a meeting with my line manager in which I strip out everything possible to bring me in at what it's supposed to be. The management can worry about covering everything else.

Secret workload model. Not everyone agrees that ours is fair but at least it's open to debate, which perhaps is the best that can be done. It sounds really tough arbitrary. Is your department going for any of this Athena SWAN or other good practice initiatives?

Ours are all secret.

My ludicrous workload comes from the standardised categories in the model, pretty much. It was already so laughably enormous on teaching and admin tasks alone that the categories where you get to assign timings to tasks yourself are pretty much empty. However, I have plenty of those tasks too. They automatically put in research time but you can get more. However, it's utterly moot when the basic teaching and admin tasks you've got (even when leaving some courses out) add up to more than your entire workload should.

We publish everything so everyone sees what everyone does. In principle anyway. I'm sure there are invisible tasks...