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.

And if you dislike moaning so much, why have you insisted on bringing down this thread with it?

I know.

I didn't see your post, and I don't know how much I care about motivations or whatever - I just feel upset that apparently I cannot start a thread, which has got lots of brilliant women sharing helpful advice and making each other feel better, without it being derailed by the same out deliberately woman-blaming shit.

MRD, this is a great thread. Thank you.

Thank you.

I wasn't fishing - I just feel I get a lot of support from MN and I love being able to chat to people, and it is a pity to see it ruined by someone coming and derailing the discussiong with what boils down to 'ha ha, you're all lazy, moaning poor people lol'.

Apparently I do help a lot of people and am their role model. If academia pays enough great. If it doesn't do something else.

I provide solutions - like childcare options rather than patting on back isn't life hard cosy mummy love ins. Part of the solution i equal marriage and never putting your career on a back burner and letting husbands' careers prevail.

I can always be ignored. If no one replied to my posts then they could carry on their own conversation.

Afternoon,

We'd just like to remind you of our talk guidelines.

Many thanks,

MNHQ

It is very hard to ignore constant personal attacks, xenia. I don't see why we should, either.

If you are someone's role model, that's lovely and I'm sure it's a very nic feeling. But right now, here, what you are doing is systematically attacking people.

You're not providing solutions, because you don't know anything about academia or work/life balances. That is fine: not everyone has to be well informed about everything. But it is really rude to keep on derailing threads just in order to pat yourself on the back when you've successfully made other people feel bad.

I'm sure you have a lot of useful advice for women on managing careers in the law, Xenia, and possibly other city-type careers where the challenges and rewards are similar.
Academia, not so much.

Anyway, getting back to the subject ... I was interested in what arbitrary said about teaching and who does it.

I always feel awkward about teaching as a PhD student, because I know it's seen as farming it out to someone who isn't qualified. I like teaching, but I do get that it's not going to be the same as having the lecturer doing it. So it's interesting to hear that there still seem to be gendered divisions later on. How do people just 'get out' of teaching?

Well I don't have a problem with postgrads teaching. It's important that they can get teaching experience (and earn some more money). What I object to is being given a postgrad tutor in place of a lecturer. It just gives me additional work.

Fine, if I've got a team of postgrads who'll be taking all the tutorials for a large UG class; I'll make them a teaching pack and have a briefing meeting because I really don't want to take 10 tutorial groups every week. But not 'oh Prof X has bought himself out. Here, have a postgrad we're paying at tutor rate instead of an actual lecturer for his classes'. That is the management team trying to cheap out.

And, of course, Prof X won't be producing the materials and briefing the tutor because that would defeat the point of buying himself out. So it falls to all the (female) junior staff to take on the work with no acknowledgement in our workloads.

And that eats into the time we could be using applying for grant money with which to buy ourselves out from teaching. (Although that would just displace rather than solve the problem).

I'm going to do one last post and leave this thread. I can't be done with hectoring (poor old Hector! What did he ever do apart from having his body dragged about Troy or something like that?) You'd think discussions are a two-way thing.

I love my job - I like doing research, I like teaching postgraduates, and sometimes I even like teaching undergraduates. I like not having a set agenda for my research. I like doing things no one else has done before. The thrill of the chase, if you like. Makes you feel alive, that kind of thing. I like not having orders to follow most of the time. (Maybe I'm lucky with my department.) I like the flexibility (up to a point, of course. Can't quite not turn up to give lectures ...) and being able to do things in my own time. (Maybe I am very very lucky.)

I like my colleagues - I like being surrounded by my intellectual equals. And people who listen and understand even when they don't agree (perhaps I'm lucky with my colleagues). People who can follow your argument rather than take the repeat-enough-times-and-it-becomes-true approach or the talk-louder-than-you-so-I-win approach or the fingers-in-ears approach.

So bye for now. It's interesting to hear about other experiences in other universities. Best of luck to everyone!

I have just read the original article, and to be honest, I have seen what it is describing first hand. At 35, I am lucky enough to be a Reader in a hard-science at a Russell Group university and I am a man. Most of my peers who are women - the people I did a PhD with - either dropped out of academia, or are still postdocs (10 years!). If they happen to be lucky enough to have an academic job, they are part-time (looking after children) suffering discrimination by a largely male management, often with such a huge teaching and administration load, they wonder why they ever wanted to be an academic.

Some examples:
One of my peers (at another institute) has no fewer than 100 students she must give tutorials to each week, plus three lecture courses per semester. She works a 90+ hour week, does next to no research, and watches her colleagues around her get promoted because they have been successful in gaining funding.
Another peer (at a different institute) was given three lecture courses and a large departmental administrative load, 1 month after returning from maternity leave. Within a year, she was given another 3 lecture courses, making 6 plus the admin job. She only worked part-time. Her full-time (male) colleagues only had 4 lecture courses, or 2 plus an admin job. She actually told me she got pregnant the second time as she wanted out of her job.

I look at this situation and at every opportunity I try to correct it. But I can't, single handed, change an entire sector. What can be done?

So why do these very very bright women pick jobs which are paid about the same as acall centre person on the minimum wage?

Some women choose careers in academia because ... they want to help cure cancer (salaries in industry for scientists are sometimes even lower than academia btw so 'If academia pays enough great. If it doesn't do something else' doesn't work.). Or they want to discover a bit more about the cosmos. Or because they want to teach a future generation. Or because they are just so passionate about their subject that it is more valuable to them than mere money. Doing what you love part time or at a lower level than a man might achieve may still be more satisfactory than not following your dream and doing some job that xenia would consider well paid (there are vastly too few of those to go around bright women or men anyway, which is a fundamental problem) but which doesn't 'advance the sum of human knowledge'.

The other problem is that those jobs that Xenia does regard as acceptable rely upon large numbers of other people to choose to go into education (at all levels) in order to produce the workers they need.

I would rather be a junior lecturer for the rest of my life than work in the city. I'd like my workload to be more sensible so that I could actually do the research bit (which I love and which does bring real value to the world), and I'd like to work in a university where the overall gender ratio of all staff (at all grades from cleaners to professors) is 50-50, but where the numbers of women plummet off a cliff between lecturer and senior lecturer and less than 10% of the professors are women.

I'd also like for university management not to go about awarding themselves £42k pay rises while freezing everyone else's pay, casualising labour where possible and then writing books extolling the virtues of left-wing politics.

upto - please don't leave. I think probably the hectoring has stopped.

The final point about university management doing one thing while deluding themselves about another possibly explains why so many men can preside over embarrassingly unequal universities (and departments) while congratulating themselves on how wonderfully right on and feminist they are.

arbitrary - thanks for explaining. That makes perfect sense (and, grr, that's annoying).

DrDo - what you say scares me. My supervisor recently spoke scathingly about 'people who do postdocs for ten years' ... but then, when do you have the children? I know a lovely woman who told me very earnestly that the way to do it is to become a professor in your late 30s and have them then. But most people don't become professors in their late 30s and most women can't have children then (I know some can. But.)

But yes, it's surely never going to be a matter of small individual changes? Or am I being ignorant? I would think the basic structure needs to change.

MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik :)

Should clarify (my typing skills have eluded me) my university is that unequal and I'd like not to work in one so unequal. It is an embarrassment. And what's worse is that their gender equality reports make a big fuss about how the sector average is worse (as if that makes it OK).

The problem with 10 years of postdocs is that it doesn't demonstrate independence or creativity. You spend 10 years doing someone else's bidding - that's what short-listing committees think. You would probably be excellent at carrying out research, but committees would question whether you had any new ideas yourself or be able to lead a research programme. 10 years is a dead end career, whatever the reality if your situation.

Not sure leaving kids until early 40's (earliest that even the best can really make prof - 39 is quite exceptional) is the right way forward for everyone. You'd have to be pretty confident of your own abilities. I think the majority of the women academics would not be able to have kids. My wife and I decided to have kids early (she got pregnant a couple of weeks after submitting my PhD thesis) and is now embarking on an academic career. That's another solution, maybe? But also not suitable for everyone.

The sector as a whole has to change - and it would be a brave VC to do that unilaterally. This means government funding has to change - there is so much pressure to be the "best" now (just look at the increasing concentration of research council resources on fewer and fewer institutes). And we have to stop the marketisation of HE to stand a chance of making things more equal. It has to come from the top, the government, but I don't think they will do it. They are too obsessed with extracting economic growth from education to realise that this obsession is actually having the opposite effect.

Yes, I understand the problem.

And my point was that being a prof in your late 30s would be exceptional.

Sorry, possibly it wasn't clear in my post!

But yes, erm, that's my worry ... the not being able to have kids.

It's generally pretty easy for male academics to have kids. Statistically, they do fine (I am sure it is a lot of work, I just mean, as a group). But my DH can't have kids for me when I submit my thesis, that's the thing.

The 'right time' to have kids is certainly an issue. I didn't meet my DH till the final year of my PhD, and I didn't want to wait 10 years until I'd established myself before having them. Hence, the only option remaining was to have kids in the postdoc years and hope for the best!

Like I said above, I'm not sure that's worked out for the best with regards to my academic career, but I'm still sure it was the best option personally. I didn't really anticipate how much 'momentum' I'd lose regarding research and publications, but maybe this is my problem for not really thinking ahead enough?