In a provocative column on The Chronicle’s Web site today, Amy Kittelstrom, an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, argues that “academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas.” She writes:
Give it its own category; call it “reproductive allowance.” For my two “easy” pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That’s a book right there, and then some.
Let’s face facts, she writes: Time spent on childbearing and child rearing “is time away from scholarship,” so why not openly acknowledge that motherhood limits scholarly “productivity in ways that fatherhood does not”? Not talking about it only “perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn’t hinder women’s careers at all,” Kittelstrom writes.
And it is a major handicap, she notes. According to research by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley, married women with children are much less likely than their male counterparts to land tenure-track jobs and get tenure. “But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men,” Kittelstrom adds.
Let’s not forget why academic dads are so productive: Their partners are picking up the slack for them at home, she writes:
Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls “ideal workers.” The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls “marginalized caregivers,” the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three months to years. [...]
For the duration of a full-time caregiver’s occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
Which is why it’s a mistake for universities to treat academic moms and dads alike and make book publication the main criterion in hiring and promotion, Kittelstrom concludes:
When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn’t be penalized for lacking reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Readers, tell us what you think of Kittelstrom’s proposal. What do you think is the best way to improve the career prospects of academic mothers?
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10 Responses to The Mommy Handicap
skaking - February 12, 2010 at 9:06 pm
If you’re one of the chosen few who work at such elite places that require so much scholarly productivity… suck it up or get out. You know what the requirements are going in, so do it. If that means putting your kid in daycare when its wee and leaving it there for ungodly hours, well… Do it or don’t. The choice is yours. Women are not penalized for using their organs. They’re penalized for not doing the work required. It seems she’s using organs and babies as an excuse.
jffoster - February 13, 2010 at 8:18 am
The article we are referred to was one of the more interesting and thoughtful articles I have seen on this set of problems and issues, particularly in the delineation of them. The proposed solution won’t fly. It will be difficult for instance to come up with a principled basis to keep primarily male household jobs derived from such things as greater upper body strength from being put onto curriculas vitarum (shovelling several inches of heavy global warming, for instance.) Particularly interesting was the postress’s pointing out how the legal proscriptions on raising questions about family status and situation have had unintended consequenses, i.e. partially backfired. I have felt constrained in the last two dozen years or so from raising these with female graduate students or female upperclassmen considering graduate school. However, once a student has raised the question herself, I have considered the door opened and that trying to help her get a sense of the realities of higher education employment fair game and within my duties and responsibilities. There are some realities of life one had best face, including these:0. Human reproduction and initial nursing child care is heterosexual. 1. Corporations in general do not and cannot hire people primarily or substantially to bear and raise their own children. Nor can or will universities. Most colleges won’t either, although some colleges and small universities with a heavy focus on “community” may come closer to it. 2. Some fields prefer “two books” for tenure; others set more store by a series of articles in journals where the criteria and referee boards are known and not somewhat fuzzy. History tends to be a book preferring field; anthropology and linguistics tend to prefer articles. A prospective apprentice for entry into academia, particularly one with a child-bearing biological clock, needs to consider these things in advance, in the light of an appraisal of the totality of the kind of life she wants to live. 3. It is occasionally possible if one is lucky to have one’s cake and eat it too. Usually it is not. 4. Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3. Corollary: doing things out of time and season may be more difficult and may incur special problems. It is not in general the duty nor obligation of one’s employer to solve or “fix” them and render them moot. 5. “job”, “career”, “profession”, and “vocation” mean different things. It is well not to confuse them. I have noticed that the happiest most fulfilled people are those fortunate enough to, whether by analysis and /or accident, seek, discover, and /or land in a ‘calling’, a vocation, whether it envolves a job, a career, a profession, and / or none or some combination of these.
boiler - February 16, 2010 at 7:59 am
“Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls “ideal workers. … For the duration of a full-time caregiver’s occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.”I wish people would stop writing things like this. I don’t know what went on in the 1950s, but fathers nowadays spend an awful lot of time on family responsibilities, and the idea that their home workload decreases when they have children is preposterous. Children, especially those with illnesses or special needs, need support from both parents, and homemaking mothers need support from their husbands. The image of the unburdened father, free to devote nights and weekends to scholarship while his wife labors cheerfully at home, doesn’t answer to the reality of any of the academic fathers I know. But on a more constructive note:Ten or fifteen years ago, someone (was it Rosabeth Kanter?) proposed a business career path that came to be called the “mommy track”. The idea was that traditional corporate careers were based on a model in which men with wives at home were the standard employee, and that women who wanted to have children were inherently disadvantaged by it. The suggestion was that an alternate career path be developed, one which would lead to different sorts of leadership positions in the company. Those who took it would go in a different direction from the standard corporate ladder, but they would have a chance to combine motherhood with real professional achievement.I always thought the idea was a good one, one which acknowledged the real differences between men and women in reproduction. It was roundly rejected, however, by people who felt it would have led to a two-tiered employment system, with men getting the top jobs and women getting lesser ones. Perhaps it would have; but it would also have given women the possibility of both raising their own children and having a successful career, an option which I think many would prefer to the current system, which requires them either to put their kids in day care or abandon professional ambition.I wonder whether it would be worth considering something comparable for academia, a tenure track designed for women who have children. You could do it a number of ways. On the simpler end, you could just make the tenure clock longer; on the more complicated end, you could design a different kind of faculty position, perhaps one which would involve tenure for a part-time position or an emphasis on teaching and service over research. Whatever its form, it could be something that women planning to have children could choose if they wanted it.
inselberg - February 18, 2010 at 11:10 am
There is nothing new or particularly provocative here. Without the security of tenure this wouldn’t be even discussed. Please put it on your cv and when you try to find a new job, you will find out how much other universities, private companies, or other agencies actually value that effort.
dn871263 - February 18, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Having children does come at a most critical time of a person’s career. However, it is a choice. It faces a couple with the real-world consequences of their desire to reproduce. If something has to give – part or all of one career, sleep, good parenting, or whatever, they cannot say they didn’t see it coming. And, it is not the business of one’s employer to solve that problem or make that choice for the couple. Work it out for yourself, make your own compromises and sacrifices. Don’t expect your employer or your co-workers to sacrifice on behalf of your desire to reproduce.
carremi - February 18, 2010 at 1:48 pm
i agree with (#5 db871263)…it’s 2010 reproducing is a choice not a sacrifice … one has to accept that compromises will need to be made once you make that choice…
czarevna - February 18, 2010 at 3:02 pm
I am not sure what to make of all of this talk about how “reproducing is a choice.” So if every woman everywhere chooses not to have children, where does that leave us as a society? It strickes me as deeply nihilistic to insist that this false dichotomy — that individually women can either choose to strive for equality by not reproducing, or they can accept second-class citizenship as mothers — is the only option. Indeed, I would submit that there has been substantial improvement on these issues in Europe, where time and support for families has been addressed in the laws for over a decade now. So it is factually, logically untrue that these are the only choices we as a society have. To insist otherwise is of course to advocate for the continuing subjugation of women.
philostitute - February 18, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Being a mother is a handicap and to not acknowledge the reality of this situation defies statistical evidence. The posts above that characterize reproduction solely a rational choice have never been surprised by arrival of an unexpected child. In any case, we have a double standard that is real and falls heavily on the backs of women. It is clear to any woman who ventures into PhD territory: having children is an extreme liability. Only 15%-20% of women with PhD’s choose to do so because of the prejudices displayed above. In my graduate program, senoir women would warn married female graduate students not to have children or be willing to pay the price, no tenure. I also participated in ABD writing groups where it was common for women to lose committee members (from both prestigious and mundane programs) for the crime of getting pregnant. We celebrated the births of graduate student babies when their fathers were in the program; the women soon disappeared. As ABD students we knew, chilrearing is potentially terminal for your career. Yet, we somehow hoped things would change when the Boomer women took over and created family friendly environments, except that never happened.I dutifully decided not to have children in exchange for the career, but a happy accident shortly after completing the dissertation made me a mom. After 4 years, I love the mom part, but do not respect those who feel that I should somehow be willing to forgo 15 years of study to stay on the lecturer track as punishment for being foolish enough to have kids. My male counterparts with kids all obtained jobs precisely because they had a stay at home spouse to take care of things while they wrote. This article reflects my experience 100%. Ironic, sad & true – women pay the price and we hide it out of shame.
boiler - February 19, 2010 at 11:37 am
I strongly agree with comments 7 and 8 — framing this discussion in the context of personal reproductive choices is pointless and counterproductive. As a society, we need women to have children, and as a society we have an interest in making it possible for women who do that to participate in the professional world to the best of their ability. If we force women to choose between reproduction and careers, we rob ourselves our their contributions in both spheres.The women under discussion in this column are very intelligent and capable people. We’re better off as a society if people like this are having and raising children, and we’re better off as a society if people like this are working in our universities. This isn’t a matter of “using organs and babies as an excuse” (what a comment — ugh). It’s a matter of our society finding a way to avoid wasting talents and abilities that we badly need.
daddyd - February 26, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Academic man has wife who gets preganant. What happens to his scholarship for the next year?Academic woman gets pregnant. What happens to her scholarship?Even if the man contributes equally in the domestic sphere once the mother returns to work–even say she weans and sticks the kid in daycare at three months to do this–the effect on their respective careers is not equal.That’s all we are talking about here. Just equalizing the dis-equalizing effect of the womb and the mammary glands. The article is not saying a university should subsidize choices that can equally be made by either sex or subsidizing parenthood more generally.