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

not surprised that having a family curtails one's academic career. No prospect for PT, noone else stops researching just 'cause you go on mat leave and points for papers in top journals make prizes irrespective of time off for mat leave.
Am currently doing intermediate fellowship applications with a newborn and a toddler and am finding engaging brain almost impossible.
Doing an interview for a fellowship at 5d post natal (annual competition so no chance to defer) was, quite frankly, laughable.

Sorry. I'm sure I'm babbling. It's just I am still quite bitter.

But relieved that it really wasn't just me, being a whinger. It is amazing to see other women writing about similar experiences. It is the sort of thing that is a prophylactic against despair and madness.

I think you are right, thecatfromjapan about the structural bias about the ref and funding. I've sat on a number of appointments committees in the last ten years and have seen an immense ratcheting up of expectations about what young scholars have to achieve to start a career. In the last job we were appointing to having four REF-able items was a floor expectation, and we were seeing applications from people onto their second book-length project. The need to keep producing continuously in order to have a good enough track record to secure grant money is another factor that keeps people on the treadmill.

I know women who have children and really stellar academic careers. The ones that sustain that over many years, however, tend to have a supportive partner in the background. This is very, very marked with the most successful women in my field. Another factor is both partners being able to live and work locally -- so many academic couples are now commuting (one or both partners) and that makes childcare harder to manage.

niminy - that is a very wise post.

I also completely agree with the point Malenky made earlier, and would like to expand upon it:

If you are setting up a workplace-as-a-process in such a way as to effectively eliminate a large slice of the population (eg. women-with-children) it is going to impact on the structural point-of-view of that workplace/orgnisation: its shape; its evolution; its ethos; and the products it produces.

Not only will this implicit exclusion colour the naturr of the research being done, what is recognised as research, who does the recognising, and so on, but as the process of exclusion continues, so the possibility of critique and change of the process of exclusion, of the organisation itself, becomes more and more limited.

I was stunned how much of a leper and a whiner I was made to feel because I was primary carer for my children and would-be academic. I couldn't get any recognition of the things I needed - and I did need them, eg. childcare - without being made to feel like someone pleading special circumstances. And, yes, like rosie, my dh's career was the "real" one - what I was trying to do was just a hobby. Unlike men I knew, who had children, but had female partners doing the bulk of the childcare - because of the greater "reality" afforded to male doings.

That last issue, of course, is a problem of the wider culture, but it impacts hugely on any woman with children.

I also have a theory that the mania about REF and funding in academia is going to structurally bias that workplace against women with children.

Notice I said "structurally". It won't be direct discrimination, just lots of small factors adding up to making it an environment that it is pretty darn hostile to women with children.

That makes me feel a bit better.

I found things soooo hard when I had children. And yet all the anecdotal evidence was that it was just me.

I object to the sexism 0 that dull housework and cleaning up after a man is somehow a hallowed thing and female and something women adore and they are making a feminst choice to be the servant of the family whilst shooting their caerer to pieces

What we need to change is the norm that women earn pin money and aren't much good at work and men are better and earn a lot. If all these husbands of the part timer women on the thread were the ones in the kitchen instead the women would have decent careers.

I would not like to see caring activities more valued. They can be as dull as ditch water and it is sexist people who want to chain women to kitchens who suggest they are difficult or interest roles. They aren't which is why anyone can clean and those kinds of jobs are the lowest of the low in most societies.

Sol my questions above were valid - do the women go part time because their husband are better than they are. Did they marry a man who was cleverer than they are? Did they know they wanted to stay home a lot and do school collections and housework so picked a higher status better man who was the one more likely to succeed in university posts?

That's very sobering niminy -- thank you for sharing that, it's giving me something to think about.

Well, they won't need academics either!

I would also like to see caring and growing actvities more valued, I would like them not to be seen as female activities though.

Speaking as a (woman) academic whose career has slowed since motherhood, I have found that the slowing down has happened gradually since I had my children, and has accelerated since they went to school.

Initially, I would say that even though I chose to come back from work after my first maternity leave on a fractional (0.7) basis, it didn't affect my research career. I was able to draw on projects started before I became pregnant, and on contacts and networks that I made when I was able to go to many more conferences and so forth. And my childcare was tailored around my needs as a working mother.

Once I had another child, and having two (and one with increasingly apparent SNs) was much more time-consuming than having one, my ability to draw on work I'd previously done as the basis for new research was diminishing. I was doing fewer conferences, and said no to more things because I couldn't take them on. The direction of my research changed (and I suspect this is an arts thing) because of the change in my life and thinking my children had meant.

Then they went to school, and suddenly the childcare wasn't tailored around my needs. One child's SNs meant that we couldn't use after-school care: school was enough of a burden for him. My ability to find stretches of time to start new research projects was severely affected by childcare time. As they have got older they don't need me less -- indeed, in some ways, they need me more. And I can no longer count on them being in bed and using the evening to work in.

So: the networking/conferencing side of research life has been eroded, and the stretches of time necessary to do new reading and major writing have been whittled away, and I can no longer build on what I was doing 10 years ago -- and my research has now settled in a much less fashionable area.

I wanted to tell that whole story because it's not just what happens to your career in the immediate aftermath of having a child that counts, it's what happens to it in the years after. As it is, I am ok with knowing that I'll never be promoted, and I am happy that my childless colleagues do get the rewards that their dedication gets them. It's just that having children is a long game, and the times when it can make the most demands of you are often those middle years when you might be expected to be making your career.

Yes Rosie, I certainly do see that.

It's part of what I was getting at, that there is such a social norm for the woman's career to defer to the man's, unless it's some insanely high-wage, high-status job.

This is really interesting discussion, and the situation certainly sounds much worse in the US than the UK. Has anyone else found that in couples where one partner is an academic and one isn't, the academic's job is seen as the 'main' one when he's a man, and the 'secondary' one when she's a woman. I've encountered that a lot recently: mothers who are academics are going part-time (now that that's becoming more of an option), limiting the number of conferences they do, etc., but non-academic mothers married to academics seeing their own career - whatever that is - as secondary to their partner's because he 'has' to go away a lot for research, move the family for a better job, and so on.

I agree entirely, dreaming. I like Xenia's posts- she reminds us of the extreme which is worth hearing about, seeing as the other extreme (SAHM hood) is so widely talked about already.

It's not for me, I like leaving work early and having play time and tea and bath with DS, but I don't think anyone should take it as a personal attack.

I agree with a lot of that marfisa, and I'd like to see that model too.

And I do see the danger in Xenia's argument, but I guess as a half-assed constructivist I see her argument as an important transitional one to change norms, you need normative outliers. If you want to change the game, you need people on the inside who play it well, both to inspire others and to have the power to make changes. I actually like the way Xenia pops up to remind us all that there is a different way of doing things I mean, obviously you are free to disregard her advice for your own personal life, but it's good to have that reminder, I think. It's exactly what my own mother, a radical 70s feminist, would say.

I'm a bit of an outlier myself. My field is very male-dominated. When I go to meetings and confabs, do research team work, I'm always the only woman in the room. I'm hoping to do a postdoc in my department next year, again I will be the only woman on the team.

It is only now that I'm finishing my phd that I'm finding out that everyone assumed I wouldn't finish, because I had a baby midway through. Apparently I'm the first woman in the department to have a baby and still finish in years and years. I find that so depressing, and yet I'm kind of happy that I've bucked the trend and perhaps people won't leap to those assumptions so much, knowing at least one person who's done it.

But I never could have done it if I weren't married to an enlightened kind of guy, who is happy to split childcare and everything 50/50, who is willing to move around, who really has sacrificed so much -- and not because my work brings in so much money, but because it makes me happy. Like so many things, it really is the political AND the personal affecting individual outcomes.

I totally agree, dreaming. Again and again I have seen academic couples who started out on an equal footing, and then the woman's career has slowed or stopped while the man's has carried on. It's an issue that has caused a lot of tension in my own relationship, despite the fact that I have a DH who is (in theory, at least!) totally supportive of my career. When we had DC1 and a long-distance commute was no longer feasible, I was the one who gave up my job. It was utterly terrifying. We negotiated arrangements where he was doing part-time childcare and I was doing part-time research even when I was not employed ANYWHERE and was not earning any money, because otherwise the career I had worked so hard for would have gone completely by the wayside, and both of us had to be committed to not letting that happen.

It was also hard though because I was struggling with my own split desires - before I became a mother I never would have guessed how much I would want to spend time with my DC, and how hard it would be to leave them with someone else. Don't get me wrong, I never wanted to be a SAHM (valid choice though it may be), but DH found it far easier to drop off a crying baby in nursery, knowing that the baby would be fine, and get on with his work, while I tended (and still tend) to find it very difficult. It's not just society imposing norms on me, it's a personal psychological struggle. It has got easier with DC2 though. I don't know whether it's a personality thing or a gender thing or both.

I still find Xenia's line of argument pernicious, though, because in the US especially there is a mentality that academia should make no allowances for parenthood. So the women academics who succeeded early on succeeded largely by behaving exactly like male academics: putting their work first and their family second. (Which maybe explains why they can be so horrible to younger women trying to juggle academia and motherhood.) That doesn't have to be the only way of doing things. To me, feminist academia means changing the model so that both mothers and fathers can devote more time to family life. Department lectures can happen during school hours instead of in the evening, both parents can do pick ups and drop offs, slowing down the rate of research when there's a baby in the family does not put someone's career into jeopardy. That's the model I would like to see.

I kind of agree with Xenia's larger point though. Okay, maybe it's not on to criticise women at the individual level, but it is true that it tends to be women going part-time, sacrificing more of their career, etc and so on. You see this all the time on MN: 'my husband made more money and had more career potential so I gave up my job to look after the kids'. Fast forward 5 years and now that woman is screwed looking for work and totally dependent on the goodwill of her husband.

I think this is a particular danger in academia because of some aspects of the job. At the beginning you'll increase your chances of a job if you're willing to move anywhere how many men are willing to give up their jobs or even their careers to tag along? You have to do a lot of writing and conferences outside of normal working hours how many men are willing to step up with childcare, etc.?

Obviously some men are but this is not a traditional role for them. Normally it is the woman making these sacrifices.

Basically I think the problem is not just structural, but normative. Yes there are all kinds of policies that could be changed, but as long as there is this societal norm or trend that women's careers will defer to their husband's, we will still have a problem in academia. It's not that well paid, it entails a lot of sacrifice, and on a purely 'logical' level it will often come second best to a lot of other careers.

Yes, that's it exactly. Unprofessional mum = multitasking dad!

X post. Yep. Male academics doing childcare is much less damaging to their reputation. My husband took my son to the lab for a whole day when I needed some work to be done over a weekend. I have never ever taken him into work. Wouldn't dream of it. And would worry it looked unprofessional. My husband said people complimented him on his multitasking abilities. Hmmm.

Interesting post, Potol. What you say resonates entirely with my experiences of working as an academic in the US and UK.

I'm sure you're right, Malenky. For example, my DH has been known to take our toddler into work with him when he has a meeting and we're in a particularly tight spot. Apparently other staff members not in the meeting are "delighted" at the opportunity to look after said toddler for a little while. I find this outrageous... as a mum I would never dream of dragging one of our DC along to work and expecting other staff to entertain him! But there's something about a man with a baby that apparently makes other women keen to jump in and help. Supposedly.