According to a report released this week, tenure-track faculty members in the physical sciences at research universities are happier with their jobs than their tenure-track faculty peers are, an article in The Chronicle says. Tenure-track humanities professors also gave their jobs high marks, found the study, by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, or Coache, a research project at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education that is supported by the Ford Foundation. Those in education and the visual and performing arts said they were least satisfied with their jobs, the report said.
The survey, which was based on responses from 9,512 tenure-track faculty members at 63 institutions, also examined satisfaction levels along gender lines, with women reporting less satisfaction than men when it came to the tenure process, hours worked, amount of time for research, work-life balance, and the compatibility of the tenure track with raising children, wrote Kelly Truong, a reporter for The Chronicle. She quoted Shelley Correll, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, as saying that gender expections at home were largely to blame:
“Almost any university survey you look at, women have a harder time coordinating work and family, women end up doing more work at home, more work at child care, and this makes the work of being a faculty member harder,” she said.
The latest Coache findings on gender are consistent with those of another new study by researchers at the Center for Toddler Development at Barnard College, which was featured in The Washington Post this week. The study by Tovah Klein, the center’s director, and Danielle Auriemma, a research assistant there, suggests that the tenure track is not so hospitable to mothers or would-be mothers, despite the flexible hours. The reason? “The average female doctorate is awarded at 34, an age when many college-educated women are starting families,” while tenure, “a defining moment in a professor’s career, is decided roughly seven years later, just as the parenting window is closing,” the newspaper notes.
That may explain why, according to a 2009-10 survey by the American Association of University Professors, even though the proportion of women in academe has more than doubled in the past 20 years, tenured men still vastly outnumber tenured women—61 percent to 43 percent, the Post adds.
The Barnard study findings, which were presented last month at an AAUP conference, are based on interviews with 20 female faculty members at seven different institutions with children between 1 1/2 and 3 years old. While many of those interviewed said the flexible hours of the job were a big plus, they cited the “never-ending nature of the job” as a major minus and hindrance to striking that elusive work-life balance.
On a related note, several academic bloggers recently had a little something to say about the division of labor at home.
Share your thoughts and academic-parenting tales of woe or success.
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3 Responses to The Search for Sanity in a World Full of Chaos
robertkase51 - July 15, 2010 at 5:16 pm
It is more about which parent has the most flexibility. If the father has more, then they run around more after the kids (unless the wife chose a loser for a husband). If the wife does, then it is reversed. If the wife is a professor then their schedule may be more flexible than the husband’s. In my own case, my wife was a nurse and could never leave early or take off during the day, and always had to work late, take call etc. I could, so I did. I ran to the day care, I ran to the school, stayed home when they were sick, often made dinner,stayed up half the night doing my own work, etc. Then again, some relationships don’t share the same equality, but please don’t blame it on academics. The job has little to do with it. If the wife feels like she has the lion’s share of the domestic responsibility, then the situation would be much worse out in the business world. It is mostly about choices of careers, partners, and the decisions and the values we make, and not about the demands of academia.I would also be curious to know if the disparity of contentment between the Humanities/Arts and Physical Sciences is related to the disparity in salaries. Scientists tend to have higher salaries than many in the humanities and arts.
enadin - July 19, 2010 at 10:50 am
my husband and i are both academics, in science, and now that we have a 5-month-old, i can relate to the study. i’d heard about this anecdotally from several friends and from online forums ….. the thing is, in the first year of a baby’s life if a mother is breastfeeding, it’s hard to get around the disparity. our son is in daycare 3 days a week. i get to work 3 days a week (but take away 1.5 hours each of those days for pumping). my husband works 5.5 days of the week. i think because women tend to “tend house” more, they take upon themselves more of the burden when there’s a new member. in my case, i do all the bottle sterilizing, the washing and folding of baby clothes, the reading of books about baby care, cleaning the house, etc. but my husband researched daycare centers and manages the bills. does it even out? i don’t know.i do wish we felt less guilty about taking a weekend off to just enjoy ourselves! but we are on the tenure track.
sdblogger - July 29, 2010 at 9:27 am
Being a parent requires time, energy, hard-work, lack of sleep, and extra responsibilities for moms and dads. I am a 31-year old mother of a toddler and received my doctorate just days before she was born. I think the timing is trickier for women because of pregnancies, pre- and post-partum hormones, maternity leave, and breastfeeding (in some cases), but work-life balance is a struggle for both parents! After our daughter was born, a friend told me and my husband, “It seems like you BOTH feel you’re doing more than you ever did before! And that’s because you are!”For more of my views on student development visit http://www.studentdevelopmentblog.com.