"My wife was due in April of 1999 but she delivered at 25 weeks, two days before Christmas. You can imagine this was a frightening experience," recalls Ricardo Padrón, an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. His son faced months of hospitalization, and for the parents, "It was an emotional roller coaster, with the constantly looming threat of long-term complications that included mental retardation, long-term breathing disorders, and possible death."
Doctors at the neonatology unit at UVa "impressed on us the importance of parental involvement," Mr. Padrón says. "You wouldn't think that a 25-week old preemie would respond to the presence of parents -- of something as simple as holding the parent's hand on the baby's body."
All of this added up to serious time demands on the young assistant professor, who was just a year away from his third-year review at UVa. That review would determine whether he would continue on to a second, three-year stint on the path to tenure.
Help came in the form of Joel Rini, the chairman of Mr. Padrón's department, who took the initiative and went to Jessica Feldman, associate dean of arts and sciences, to see what the university could do. What they worked out was a year off the tenure track for Mr. Padrón. He says stopping the tenure clock made all the difference.
Usually, Mr. Padrón says, he spends 70 to 80 percent of his time on his research. Instead he was often at the hospital, where his wife was spending all of her time. "It's too large a burden for one person to bear," he says, "spending all your time in an intensive care unit where death looms very large. Frankly we saw a lot of babies die. It's a very big emotional burden. No one could do it alone."
UVa allows unpaid family leave of up to one year "when family circumstances, including child care or acting as the primary caretaker for a disabled or elderly adult, makes it difficult for the faculty member to carry out assigned duties," according to its parental-leave policy. Birth mothers get 12 weeks of leave automatically, six of which are typically paid pursuant to the university's disability policy. Fathers are entitled to 12 weeks, all of it unpaid.
Many campus parental-leave policies are limited to primary caretakers, which often seems the best compromise but remains controversial. Some fathers take parental leave only to treat it as extra research leave or even vacation; one father went to Mardi Gras during a paid semester off. In that kind of situation, faculty members without children may well feel they are at an unfair disadvantage; mothers who use their parental leave for child care may feel burned as well.
Such abuses give rise to the practice of limiting parental leave to primary caretakers, especially when the time is paid. Yet that approach has a notable drawback. Mr. Padrón was not a primary caretaker; nor are most fathers. Research shows that when fathers and mothers have to compete for the primary-caregiving role, fathers typically lose out. The mothering role is just too important to most mothers to cede. A parental-leave policy that provides leave only to the primary caretaker means that "parents must go beyond role equality and engage in role reversal," Martin Malin, a professor of law at the Illinois Institute of Technology's law school, noted in an article published in the Texas Law Review.
On the other hand, gender equality can have a net positive effect on family life. When fathers increase their involvement, children tend to end up with more parental attention over all. Children benefit in another way as well: Studies show that fathers who take an active role during the first months of life tend to develop closer relationships with their children.
So how can a university design a parental-leave policy that avoids abuse without depriving fathers of an opportunity to develop their relationship with, and the skills to care for, their children? One approach is to make leave available only to fathers whose wives aren't at home full time during the leave period. But is that fair to families with homemakers?
There seems to be no easy answer. The issue is particularly important because some fathers want to take time off to spend with their families but feel unable to do so. "I've spoken with men who are afraid to ask for leave because of negative career repercussions," said Bob Drago, a professor of labor studies and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. He is the principal investigator of the Faculties and Families Project, financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In a pilot study of 71 academics, Mr. Drago found that 41.3 percent of the men in the sample said they did not ask for leave even though it would have helped them to have it. The same percentage did not stop the tenure clock, even though it would have helped them to do so.
Professor Malin argued that a father who works in a climate that makes it difficult for him to ask for parental leave, in a workplace where such leaves regularly are granted to women, may be experiencing a hostile work environment based on gender. Mr. Malin said that such fathers may be able to sue either under Title VII, the basic federal antidiscrimination statute, or under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
All of this should send up a red flag for departments that may be assuming that a lack of requests by men for parental leave means that new fathers just aren't interested. An apparent lack of interest may signal not lack of demand but a chilly climate. To make matters more complicated, says Mr. Drago, some fathers complain that when they request leave they are not taken seriously -- the assumption often is that they will use the leave not for child care but for research.
What's the solution? At a minimum, universities should clearly state the expectation that parental leaves will be used for the care of children, not to obtain the unfair advantage of additional research leave, or to go to Mardi Gras. More thought is needed on how to communicate and enforce that expectation, and on possible penalties for abuse.
This solution is less easy to administer than simply limiting leaves to women, but the extra effort is well worth it. Just ask Ricardo Padrón. His son, Santiago, who turned 2 last December, is strong and healthy. It is rare for a child born as early as 25 weeks to emerge from the experience without significant complications; his son did. "I was thinking of leaving UVa, and their response to my crisis was one of the things that made we want to stay," says Mr. Padrón, who is now in the midst of his third-year review.
Universities need to think through a fair and careful approach to changing the chilly climate for fathers -- not only to avoid potential legal liability, but to retain valued faculty members. And for a third reason: It's the right thing to do.
