You want to take a caregiving leave. Or you’re interested in working part time for a while, yet remaining on the tenure track. Or maybe you ask for a maternity leave and your department head agrees, so long as you find someone to cover your classes while you are gone. (The latter actually happened to someone I know, even though it is illegal under federal law unless the same requirement is imposed on anyone who takes a short-term leave, say, after a heart attack or prostate cancer).
How do you approach your chairman? (And chances are it will be a man.) Do you get on your knees and beg? Do you go in with a lawyer in tow, talk about gender bias, and win the battle but lose the war?
It’s best to start by thinking about it from the chairman’s point of view. He has a department to run, courses to staff, precedents to worry about. So even if his impulse is to help you, my advice is to provide him with the business case for family-responsive policies -- or, as academics are more likely to call it, the link between those policies and academic excellence.
This column is designed to help you link your request to the basic mission of the department and the institution, in a way that will resonate with administrators.
Saving Money and Preserving Lines
Make the case that granting your leave will, in the long run, do both of those things.
Departments that are slow to approve temporary leaves run the risk of having faculty members depart for good. In this age of tight budgets, the most concrete costs of a family-hostile atmosphere are the high out-of-pocket ones associated with an employee who leaves. Those “sunk costs” -- unrecoverable expenditures like the cost of setting up labs for scientists, medical researchers, and engineers -- may run into several hundred thousand dollars.
Joan M. Herbers, dean of biological sciences at Ohio State University, estimates that start-up costs for a new faculty hire in molecular biology or biochemistry are $400,000 to $600,000. When a scientist leaves, the effect is that the university has paid to build the career of someone who takes her human capital to the competition: “We don’t want to be the farm teams for the majors,” she said.
It makes no sense for universities to hire a female professor, spend thousands of dollars setting up her lab, only to have her depart because she needs a maternity leave or a part-time schedule -- and then replace her with another woman, who, in due time, may also leave for similar reasons. We’re not talking gender equity here. We’re talking raw economics.
Outside the sciences, the costs of attrition are those that apply to all professionals. According to standard estimates, replacing departing workers costs from 75 to 150 percent of their annual salaries.
Why so much? Think about it. The costs associated with a departing worker include all the initial recruiting costs: advertising, moving expenses, housing allowances, and benefits that are, in effect, signing bonuses (summer salary, for example, and money for hiring postdocs and extra research assistants).
But the most important sunk cost is the time that other faculty members spent recruiting the colleague who has left. Everyone knows that if you lead a major search, your own productivity plummets. A university that runs search after search to fill and refill the same position not only loses the productivity of the departing faculty member, but also productivity of his or her colleagues.
Additional costs include the staff time necessary to stop payroll and do exit interviews, as well as the material costs of refurbishing an office. Even steeper are the costs of having faculty members walk off with their human capital. Now, instead of strengthening your institution’s grant proposals, those individuals will be competing for money from the same agencies, armed with the relationships their old colleagues may well have helped them build. And if enough departing faculty members leave unhappy, that can erode an institution’s ability to attract high-quality candidates in the future. Then come all the costs associated with hiring the replacement.
Last but not least, department heads may worry about losing a faculty line when someone leaves.
The Realities of the Talent Pool
Since about 1995, 50 percent of Ph.D.'s have been earned by women -- in some fields, that percentage is even higher. A department that defines “commitment” as someone available to work 50 to 60 hours a week for 40 years without a break is defining its workplace ideals in a way that may well exclude half the talent pool.
Nationally, 95 percent of mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 work less than 50 hours a week, so an employer who offers only a 50-hour-a-week schedule wipes most women out of its labor pool. Census data show that 82 percent of women in that same age bracket have children. When women give birth they need maternity leave. While they are caring for children, most will want to work shorter hours than the average academic does today.
A 2003 study at the University of California found that male faculty members work an average of 54 hours a week, while female ones work 52 hours. Parents with an average commute who work 50 hours a week will leave home at say, 7 a.m., start work at 8 a.m., leave work between 5 and 6 p.m., and return home around 7 p.m. -- if they don’t work weekends. Only a tiny percentage of Americans would view that as an appropriate schedule for a mother, which helps explain why nearly 60 percent of faculty members who are married moms are thinking of leaving the profession.
Academic employers without a part-time tenure-track will “churn and burn” women through their ranks. In fact, most academic employers today are choosing and promoting professors based on schedule rather than on talent -- in a society where schedule correlates tightly with gender.
According to another University of California study by Mason and Goulden, “Marriage and the Baby Blues,” only one in three women who entered the tenure track without children ever had them, and nearly 40 percent of tenure-track women had fewer children than they wanted to.
Both patterns make many women miserable.
Academic institutions need to abandon outdated notions of the ideal worker, not only to retain women, but also to attract and retain men. Gen-Y men are less likely than their fathers to be married to homemakers and more likely to want to be more involved with their children.
The Link Between Productivity and Morale
Business-school literature documents what we all already know: Employees who are more committed to the institution have higher levels of productivity, and happy employees lead to happy customers. For example, when First Tennessee Bank offered flexible work arrangements to its employees, it saw a 50 jump in its employee retention rate, which contributed to a 7 percent increase in its customer retention rate, which translated into $106-million in additional profit over two years.
So, morale matters. We all know of dysfunctional departments that sap everyone of energy. What is perhaps less widely recognized is the demoralization, stress, and burnout produced by the long hours that most faculty members work.
A report based on a survey of faculty members at Ohio State University found that two-thirds of female faculty members -- and half of men -- thought their jobs required too much time and only one in three faculty members saw their employer as supportive of their attempts to balance personal and professional responsibilities. About a third of female faculty members in the survey delayed starting families because of professional responsibilities; they reported lower satisfaction with their jobs than men.
Clearly, faculty members’ inability to balance their work and family responsibilities corrodes morale -- which corrodes productivity and commitment.
The Link Between Stress, Infertility, and Health Insurance Costs
The stress that accompanies a busy schedule may be correlated with miscarriage. A study at the law school of the University of California at Davis reports that female lawyers who worked more than 45 hours a week while pregnant suffered three times more miscarriages than those who worked less than 35 hours a week.
Stressed-out parents are more likely to burn out. That’s bad news for an industry like academe with a tenure system that makes it very difficult to fire professors who do very little. The mad dash for tenure leaves many women on the tenure track with infertility problems. Fertility starts to diminish at age 27, long before most professors get tenure.
Stress, burnout, and high rates of infertility lead to high health insurance costs, which are a major concern for many university administrators. Until now, few have thought of containing costs by dealing with the high levels of stress, burnout, and infertility produced by decades of 50- and 60-hour workweeks. They should begin to do so.
The Potential for Litigation
Academic institutions have a unique problem: Their frontline personnel managers are department heads who who have little to no expertise in human-resource management, and may be skeptical or disdainful of personnel procedures. Recent studies show that department heads routinely discourage professors from taking leave time that they are entitled to under federal (and often state) law.
In gender-discrimination lawsuits, plaintiffs’ employment lawyers regularly point to universities’ failure to observe their own procedures as evidence. Quite apart from the risk of a jury verdict -- about as likely as lightning, but equally painful when it does happen -- even settlements in gender-discrimination cases can be expensive. One case I know of -- in which the provost called a faculty member’s decision to stop the tenure clock a “red flag” -- produced a reported tentative settlement of nearly $500,000. Now that’s news adminstrators can use.
So, also, is the fact that litigation surrounding work and family issues has increased sharply in recent years. Lawsuits alleging discrimination on the basis of pregnancy have increased 131 percent in 12 years. That’s troubling for academe given that, according to a survey by Saranna R. Thornton, an associate professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College, one in three academic institutions had policies that likely violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act or other federal legislation.
The simple point here is that academic institutions, for their own good, need to become more family friendly in order to achieve and maintain excellence. You might not persuade many administrators of that with more talk of gender equity, but by making the business case for such policies, you will change more than a few minds.
Joan C. Williams is a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.