Who Cheats the Childless?

By Joan C. Williams

By now we've all heard about the backlash against "family-friendly" policies.

Elinor Burkett, in her book, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (Free Press, 2000), quotes outraged nonparents like Sandy Graf, a 37-year-old designer: "People seem to think a professional office can double as a petting zoo, so they bring [children] in all the time. They are very disruptive ... a huge distraction for those that are actually trying to work. ... Breeders get so much time off to tend to the emergency sicknesses or the accidents or the school this or that. Who covers for them, who works more hours? The non-breeders, that's who. And no one notices. We are punished for not squirting out spawn."

The Chronicle recently joined the flood of coverage on the subject, with an article on the backlash against hiring academic couples. Apart from administrators who argued that spousal-accommodation policies help with recruitment, the only person quoted in the article as favoring these policies was an anthropology professor whose wife was accommodated. The sole authority on discrimination law quoted is Kingsley R. Browne, a law professor at Wayne State University who happens to be a conservative opponent of affirmative action. The opposing argument -- that family-responsive policies are necessary to avoid systematic discrimination against women -- is made only by the anthropology professor whose wife was hired by his department.

It's time to ask who really cheats the childless. Do mothers get "the cushy treatment" Ms. Burkett claims they do? Does a coherent rationale exist for spousal accommodation, other than the fact that it may help attract desirable candidates? And, most intriguing, why the coverage lavished on the backlash, and why the bitterness surrounding this issue?

On the question of mothers' getting cushy treatment, Ms. Burkett herself provides an answer. In her book, she notes: "Having the right to opt for that choice [both career and family] doesn't guarantee that it will be easy, or stressless, or that you will be able to do both at once without keeling over in collapse." Sociological studies document that women in dual-career households get less sleep, enjoy less leisure, and spend less time on meals. One suspects that few of these women find their lives cushy. Dual-earner women pay a price not only at home, but also at work where they lose out on promotions as well as pay raises. College-educated women lose roughly $1-million over the course of their lifetime because of child-related career penalties, according to The Price of Motherhood, by Ann Crittenden.

Let's next respond to some of the concerns expressed about spousal-accommodation policies, notably the concern over merit and quality. An article in the May/June 2000 issue of The Journal of Higher Education reported on a survey of 617 institutions about family-friendly policies. Administrators in the survey cited many benefits of these policies. One official reported that job-sharing had brought the institution "several successful teams" so that instead of having four full-time people, it had "eight people, talents, personalities, research/teaching areas" for the same price. Another administrator said that faculty members who are accommodated through part-time tenure-track positions "almost always" end up contributing more time to the university than they are paid for. Said a third: "I can think of instances where the [trailing] partner was considered to be a greater professional success and an asset to the university" than the main hire.

This is not to deny that problems exist with the way spousal-accommodation policies have been administered. Some of the most bitter debates have involved situations where spouses of highly placed administrators are imposed on departments that were given little say in the matter, according to The Chronicle article. Fact: spousal-accommodation policies can be abused. This makes them similar to every policy ever invented.

Here are some guidelines for how to start a spousal-accommodation policy without engendering a backlash:

Never impose a candidate on a department without its consent, and never waver from the principle of merit. Here's a fact we all know, but rarely admit: Merit is a necessary, but not a sufficient, qualification for actually landing an academic job. There are far more outstanding candidates than there are academic jobs; often a top candidate is not hired because a department preferred to use a scarce slot to hire someone in a different subspecialty (say, medieval rather than Renaissance literature) rather than because a candidate was not talented. An outstanding candidate who did not get an academic job because only two positions opened up in the entire country in Renaissance history, but who happens to be the spouse of a Ph.D. who did land a job on a campus, is an appropriate "opportunity hire" for that campus to make.
Make sure that your spousal-accommodation policy offers something to the department of the "opportunity hire" as well as the department of the main candidate. To the extent that the spousal hire does not reflect the department's priorities, it ought to get something in return. This means that the costs of a spousal hire should be borne, at least in part, by the central administration. A successful spousal-accommodation program is not free.
Family-responsive policies should not apply only to parents. One of the opponents cited by The Chronicle's backlash article was a woman who had had to quit two different jobs in order to care for elderly parents. Her situation had not been accommodated, she felt, so why should parents' be? The fact is that growing numbers of adults have caregiving responsibilities other than for children. Just as dutiful mothers should not have to quit, neither should dutiful daughters, or sons.
Finally, faculty stars always have been offered enticements to join a particular university. Years ago, such enticements used to consist of the opportunity to bring along young -- usually male -- protégés. Interestingly enough, this was not controversial "special treatment." If the protégé was qualified, it was understood to be simply the price of doing business -- an unavoidable cost of attracting a star. Why is spousal accommodation any different?

This brings us to the core question: Why the bitterness surrounding family-responsive policies? The venom of comments about "squirting spawn" reflects a dynamic rarely mentioned.

Let's begin with a common practice: handling maternity leaves by requiring other members in a department to teach an overload. This can be incendiary, particularly if the extra burden falls on a female colleague. Why?

Ms. Burkett suggests why when she notes that a third of women in their late 30's with graduate degrees have no children. Some of these women are childfree: They do not want children. But many more are childless, and feel deep regrets that they had to sacrifice children to succeed in a man's world.

Insult to injury: Such women face a degrading drumbeat of questions about when they are going to have children. You can imagine, in this context, that the last straw is to find yourself sacrificing your free time for the benefit of women who have managed to have both a career and children.

While it is understandable when such women focus their anger on other women, let's take a step back. Who's really cheating the childless? Is it the mothers, who are trying to cope with overload caused by jobs designed around an ideal worker who has few, if any, child-care responsibilities? Or is it employers, whose definition of the ideal worker divides women into three categories: childfree women who can live up to that work ideal without any more personal sacrifice than that required of a man; childless women, who have found that, to perform as ideal workers they have had to sacrifice family in ways not required of men; and working mothers, the roughly 85 percent of women who have children during their working lives, only to find themselves paying a steep "mommy tax."

Are mothers cheating the childless? Or are both mothers and others beleaguered and belittled by outdated work ideals that require women to make sacrifices that most men are not required to make, as well as by outdated gender ideals that pressure all women into motherhood whether they are suited to it or not?

Employers can't remake gender ideals. What they can do is stop employing family-responsive policies in ways that seem fated, and perhaps at times calculated, to fail.

Joan Williams, a professor of law at American University and director of its Program on Gender, Work & Family, is author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000).