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

Workload models are something else they do to claim objectivity and then fiddle though, aren't they? I've heard of plenty of cases where the amount of work ascribed to each task depends more on the influence of the person who does it than how long it actually takes.

1000 hours!

Your department needs a workload model. Athena SWAN is big on that ...

Quite a bit more than 1000 hours too.

I really don't think it's about sitting back and congratulating yourself about having produced a 'non-sexist marriage' while blaming everyone else who doesn't have one.

If I were to say to DH that I want my career to come first, he'd say that we can both do it. No problem. But we can't. Working ourselves silly and tag team parenting is not a great life. Problem is he genuinely believes that he is being supportive (and he isn't terrible); it's just he gets very obsessed in his own work and forgets everything else.

There are all sorts of other circumstances that coalesce to make it much harder in my career than his. I have to commute a long at for work, which means that I use up my time away from the home on the drudge work of academia. I do actually like spending time with my children, and would like to see them.

My workload is utterly ludicrous so I have neither the time nor energy to do anything other than what the university immediately demand of me (and even then I can't do it all because I literally cannot be in two places at once, even though the university sometimes expects me to be). My university is incredibly stingy with travel and conference finding (and DH's is generous), so I would have to draw upon family money to pay for conferences (this particularly annoys me since they use something they give me neither time nor money to do as a way of monitoring my 'performance').

I have health issues too, that aren't going to go away. The university are actually supposed to adjust my workload, but since no one seems to care than I'm more than 1000 hours over what it should be a year anyway I don't see them reducing it further. This is a real issue and it makes it very difficult not to just let DH's career come first, because I can't actually rely on my health (although it would be much better with a sane workload).

I have to say, even though sometimes I agree with you Xenia, your posts are almost perfect representations of the fundamental attribution error (wiki)

Xenia I think what's special about you is a specific set of circumstances that have worked in your favour as well as a lot of hard work and dedication on your part. I think a lot of people put in the work, but don't also have the circumstances that work for them, and end up not being as successful as they could.

There's a lot of talk at the moment about why women can't get ahead in science. I used to think that because I'd managed to get ahead in science, that there was no reason for other women not to. Now, I'm older and wiser, and think that there were many reasons beyond my control that, together with a lot of hard work, helped me get to where I am.

You may be right autumn

And it's a good point too, that often the inequality can sneak up on you. I think actually for a lot of couples, it doesn't really come out until children arrive.

So what is so special about women ilke I am who manage to achieve non sexist marriages? Why don't women say - on your bike mate on the very first date he expects you to cook for him or iron his shirt? Were they brought up in an atmosphere of subservience that they will then ensure in their marriage they do as men say? Do they feel so privileged that a man has deigned to commit to them that they accept that second lower status in the union?

of course I don't blame women but in life we need to take responsibility not just moan or say we are entitled to work 2 hours a day and still be a leader in our field. Just about anyone who had worked for 30 years as I have without maternity leaves and pretty hard can do well. I am nothing special. however plenty of men and women cannot be bothered to work very hard or seize the first chance to be supported by a spouse and not do so much work. Or they just aren't very bothered about being successful and it is a huge pity it is women who get saddled with this lower status.

The question dreaming asked Arb is the nub of it - what would have happened if you women with sexist men say - hang on mate - I've done my bit now it's yours. Plenty of us do that - my husband moved for my job, not vice versa. before we married he said if nannies did not work out he would deal with the children (in fact they did work out so we both worked full time). Is the different because some women marry up, better, cleverer men who will do better who are older than they are because they want that higher status men and so they always play second fiddle to the man and wehre they do not or they marry equally and neither is sexist it works fine? In other words is it their greed for the money and status of the better man which means women are kept down?

ArbitraryUsername, that sounds dreadful.

Yes, networking is hugely important. I wouldn't mind so much only there is a myth of objectivity in a lot of areas, like grant applications and publishing, when really people are not objective in the least and despite it being officially anonymous you know damn well who wrote the paper.

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.

(I must admit, I'm ecstatic to have escaped. It was such a headfuck.)

dreamingbohemian, can I answer, please? He'd say "of course, darling, you are right, you have a go now". But then Arbitrary would still come home to piles of dishes. That's because for many (most?) men, whatever views they espouse publicly, housework and childcare is wifework deep inside.

Networking is hugely important in academia. I would bet this is the case in any field. Networking and mentoring. It gives you an extra push, it introduces you to the key people, it teaches you to speak and write in the "right" way, it helps you find your place inside the field, it gradually guilds your confidence. My supervisor did not give a shit about my thesis, but he did include me into all sorts of events in his field and introduced me to bigwigs. If only I followed in his path and did his type of research, I'd probably be rolling in publications by now. But we don't search for easy solutions, do we?

xenia so women are now responsible for gender roles in the homes, eh? I do buy the theory that women generally should look carefully at who they are hitching up with before it happens, but life is a long and complicated matter. Things and attitudes change. And generally, upon discovering that one's husband is a sexist pig, getting divorced, halving your income and becoming a single parent is not more conducive to one's publication record that staying with the said sexist pig. Let's be real. And I have an issue with the sexist assumption that it is the woman who is solely responsible for the equitable division of labour in a family. I find the notion that a woman can single-handedly change millenia of social conditioning that his her family, her male partner, and herself by refusing to wash his socks unrealistic.

Arbitrary -- you don't have to answer this, but: what would happen if you told your DH: right, you've had a good chunk of time to advance your career, now it's my turn. I need more time to do the kind of networking necessary and keep up with my workload, and I think that's only fair.

What would he say?

Tbh I would be seriously hacked off in your position. It's absolutely not fair.

While I agree that it's very important for there to be equal roles in a household, and reject sexism assumptions at home regarding who does what, I do NOT agree that wanting to see your children at some point in their waking hours is 'domestic drudgery'.
Rather than arguing that women should be out of the house as long and work as many evening and weekends as their male counterparts do, I would rather argue that BOTH sexes should work less. Otherwise it becomes a race to the bottom and although this is academia and not corporate drudgery it is still selling your soul to 'the man'.
Academia (maybe not all departments, but the ones I know) are a bugger for expecting 60+ hours of work a week at least, it's not 'weak' or 'female' to want to eat at home sometimes or have a weekend off whether you have children or not!

[p.s. I am not 'an academic', I am a freelancer who teaches one MSc course a year at an RG uni so I am close to the issue but not inside it].

Networking is really important in my field, and I never get to do any. DH does and it makes a huge difference. For example, he's always getting invited to do stuff by people in his network. So then his university are delighted that he's been invited to talk at X, to write something, to chair a session at C, etc. I get to stay at home while he does this, which means that he further builds his networks and mine dwindle further.

It also helps with peer review. DH's papers always seem to go out to review to his own (very much 'old boys') network and they never reject each others' work. They always ask for revisions, but it comes back 'accept with...'. He then gets the other 'old boys' work to review and it further reinforces the whole system. My work goes out to strangers and has a much tougher time in review (because the people reviewing it don't think 'oh, well X will get my next paper, so I don't want to be an arse'), despite there being no difference in quality.

Recently I've noticed that there are quite a few men in the discipline who've been promoted ridiculously fast. Professor by 34 type situations. It is only men though, all the women who finished their PhDs at the same time seem to have left academia, are still in fixed-term limbo or the lucky ones are junior lecturers. Again, it doesn't seem to be based on the relative quality of their work (although the men are generally more prolific, but in the 12 papers saying more or less the same thing kind of way).

To be honest, maternity leave, an extremely difficult breastfed baby who wouldn't take milk in any other form, even at nursery when I went back to work (or tried to), some health issues and an utterly ridiculous workload have pretty much done for my career. Whereas DH's career is going from strength to strength (and the bugger moans about a workload that is less than half what i have and full of phantom tasks that are assigned loads of hours to give him extra research time). He doesn't work harder than me, and his research isn't 'better'; he just gets some time to do it and his ever growing networks help everything along.

DH's attitude is also a problem though (but he thinks he's brilliant). He had a lot help from me during his PhD and trying to get a job afterwards, without which he'd have got nowhere (I had to teach him how to write because his thesis and papers were genuinely incomprehensible, and had to heavily edit all his early papers). In contrast, he's had a quick glance through one draft of a paper I've written and nothing more. He's always 'busy'. And his work always comes first. The big problem is that as our career trajectories diverge it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against his career becoming the main focus and mine the sideshow.

'I had professors asking me if I was still going to finish my phd, just because I got married! No one my age would be that stupid.'

Contrast this, when I was finishing my PhD. A one year lectureship came up in my department which went to a recently-completing PhD student (male) who happened to be just about to get married.
After the interviews I overheard one of the older academics in the dept commenting that it was nice that it had gone to that applicant because he would need the money now he was getting married. (I have no evidence that it influenced the decision.)
The irony was, the woman he was marrying had a good job in a City bank and was already earning many times more than an academic ever would!

I also mostly agree with Xenia in general about sexism within marriage and women stepping back when they have kids being two causes of inequality in the workplace. In fact, some of her posts on the subject have made me think more about what gender roles was taking for granted and to try and push back harder against these.

But, I don't think they're by any means the only things holding women back, and academia has its own set of structural inequalities that plenty of us on this thread have encountered. By and large, the women I know (or have read interviews with) who are doing well in academia seem to have far more equal marriages than those in other careers. So on this particular thread, I think suggesting that sexism at home as the key issue is missing the point.

yes Prom, and that goes back as well to what I was saying about how it can be less about what you do and more about who you know and your personal relationships. Interesting to see others agree, thank you for answering.

I really think changing the interpersonal stuff will be a long haul, but I do think it will change eventually. I mean, I had professors asking me if I was still going to finish my phd, just because I got married! No one my age would be that stupid.

Bigkids - thanks for anwering my Q (someone else did too, so thank you as well)
The friends I mentioned can be quite scathing and/or dimissive of women who worry about it or info on the subject. They seem to think they'll be okay because they'll do it all later. I wondered how feasible this is.