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

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/06/female_academics_pay_a_heavy_baby_penalty.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_share_chunky

I thought this was interesting, though hardly surprising. I find it quite a big concern given how much research we're constantly being shown, that 'proves' women are all [insert stereotype here]. This article looking at why so many women don't progress in academia - and in particular why mothers don't - perhaps gives a good reason why we might take some research with a pinch of salt: it's largely done by men and childless women.

Yes!

And TBH I know plenty of women who don't have children, who're getting it from the other side - they have elderly parents and it's also assumed that women do the work there.

Yes indeed

Women soft-pedalling their careers is a major reason why there aren't more female professors. But there are also lots and lots and lots of structural reasons. Eg unclear, shady appointment and promotion processes that means men can be groomed for promotion and the old boys club can kick in. Massive inequalities in the number of conferences female academics are invited to speak at vs their male peers. It has even been shown that female applicants for grants need more papers to beat a man.

Oh posted too soon

I meant to add that mrd my mum, who is a big boss, says that now she has flexible working / part time requests continually from both the young women, who have children, and he older women, who are caring for parents. The men appear to be getting away without doing either

Hi all, just returning to read yesterday's posts -- really interesting stuff!

I thought ruby's strategic discussion was very interesting. IME I think young academics, particularly phd students, would benefit from more strategic guidance early on -- especially women, given the impact of having children.

I'm not sure being strategic means you always have to make decisions you don't like, but it means at least being able to 'sell' things well for the purpose of getting a job later. marfisa gave a good example earlier... for myself, I had DC during my phd, not after, so that I could sort of 'hide' that time off within my studies.

But I agree there is a limit to strategy. You can do everything right and still get nowhere, and other people manage to fall ass backwards into great posts.

Which leads to a question I have for you all: in your fields, how much is advancement determined by networking and 'who you know'?

Because it's an extremely important factor in my field, and I think this is another area where women can be disadvantaged. If you have a family you may not have time to do all the extra meetings and socialising, and even then it can be very much an old boys club.

Just wondering how we can grapple with this, because I don't really see it changing anytime soon.

I think it's important in my field. I am lucky my first supervisor was very, very keen to promote networks of women, because she was very conscious of her own past issues with the old boys' network. And she was sufficiently far on in her career to do that with some impact.

Unfortunately it also works the other way - what's not that uncommon IME is to find you're edged out of the men's club, not always consciously but just because somehow, oddly enough, the most promising bright young thing who reminds all the professors of themselves at that age ... always happens to be male ...

*NB, my snarky comment there is about a pretty specific and odd group of people in my field. They're important but they are dinosaurs so it should change.

Hugely important in my field. I am doing quite well and it is entirely owing to my PhD supervisor, who pushed her students into presenting at conferences, introduced us to big wigs and gave excellent career advice. She is still my mentor.

big your supervisor sounds lovely.

dreamingbohemian who I know is hugely important, which is why I wrote earlier that one of the little things holding me back at the moment is not having been able to attend recent conferences. Luckily, the work I put in pre-kids means I do have some good contacts who haven't forgotten about me, and my colleagues will always put in a good word in my absence :)

But see, I fully agree with Xenia that there is a problem of structural sexism within marriage. Absolutely agree. All you have to do is read the threads on here. Look at how many women sacrifice their careers, how many women do all the night wakings, how many women rely on their husbands for allowances, etc and so on.

I don't think it's as simple as solving this problem and then workplace inequalities go away. But I do think that you cannot solve workplace inequalities without also tackling sexism at the personal level.

I think the aim should be to confront sexism at every level -- personal and professional.

We may differ in how we go about that, but I don't really think our aims are that different.

There was a paper I linked to earlier somewhere which shows that if you have two identical CVs, one with a man's name and one with a woman's name on, the one with the man's name on will get a better evaluation than the one with a woman's name on. And that's evaluation from both men and women. (This was also talked about in Cordelia Fine's book.) In the New Scientist there was an article about how professional men and women showing emotions are perceived differently, by both men and women. (No prize for guessing how they are evaluated.) What is going on there? It seems to say that just saying "you just need to do this and that and not be a big girl's blouse" is not quite enough, despite some people with one-tracked minds thinking it's quite so straightforward because they've done it themselves.

My aim is not to become a professor by the time I'm 50, unless they bloody change what it means to be a professor. I will not sacrifice my research time for paper work or to attend meetings after meetings. If progressing up the ladder means I get less time to do what I like I'll stay where I get to do that. In fact I'm such a minority that I can single-handedly bugger their statistics.

What I mean is that many of us have equality at home, and are happy with our career choices, and are bloody good at our jobs, and are happy with our children. Yet we are somehow letting the side down, not being "successful". Why is that? I for one am not playing this game.

Too many posts. Must work now or my publication rate will suffer.

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.

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.

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.

'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!

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.

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].

It seems to say that just saying "you just need to do this and that and not be a big girl's blouse" is not quite enough...

Yeah.

On the subject of PhD/wedding, my supervisor came to my wedding at the end of my first year, and her advice on the subject ranged from telling me not to let it distract me from my first international conference the month before, to telling me that when she got divorced, the first thing she did was race to her publishers to get her ex-DH's name off the cover of her book - so I needed to think about that if changing my name! She also told me her dad had had to give her a stiff shot in order to get her down the aisle the first time, mind.

She then spent the entire wedding networking amongst my mates who were PhDs and telling everyone she was proud of me, bless her. This was a marked contrast to my dear dad, who said in his speech I was very lucky to be working in a library and he could see it was a great privilege for me.

It sounds funny looking back but at the time it made a huge difference to me to know that someone was supportive of my academic work and my normal life. I know people whose supervisors took the attitude that they should never hear about anything personal, so they were giving students advice they thought was impartial 'academic' advice, but it was completely unsuited to what the students were doing (and probably not that impartial anyway, probably based on what that academic did when s/he was a grad).

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.