Ive spent my entire summer dealing with this very situation with my department. In part, I was told that I should be more grateful to them for giving me, as a single mother, a chance at all. Quitting has been an attractive option. That split is thoroughly gendered. The recent and already influential book Do Babies Matter?, by Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden (Rutgers, 2013), unveils a disturbing picture of gender and family in the ivory tower. The authors found that women make up a majority of adjunct and other part-time faculty members, and that mothers of young children tend to remain locked in second-tier positions or leave academe altogether. Those who aspire to tenure-track jobs are statistically very likely to be passed over. Thus, fewer women than men occupy the tenure-track ranks, and the women are less likely than their male colleagues to be married and to have children. In effect, men get rewarded economically for having children, while women pay a price. Consequently, even though women make up a majority of the faculty in many fields (including Diana’s and mine), the implicit professorial stereotype continues to be a man with children and a wife at home to care for them...Even though Diana’s decision about whether to have children was none of my business, I had to make it my business to tell her so. That’s because my support is important to her emotional well-being and therefore to her professional progress. It’s a sorry statement about the professional world of graduate school that I have to go out of my way to state something about someone else’s personal life that ought to be obvious, but the situation is hardly unique. Other professions in the United States are likewise unevolved. The only difference may be that we professors think that we’re more progressive than we actually are, at least in this area.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 14:53:22 +0000
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