Marc Goulden

Crunches numbers on academics' family lives

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By ROBIN WILSON

Marc Goulden does not have widespread name recognition in higher education. But you've probably heard of his work.

He is the research guru behind a groundbreaking report, "Do Babies Matter?" It showed that having children before earning tenure can wreak havoc on a woman's academic career. The 2002 study -- and continuing research on the topic -- has made a huge splash. It is considered the gold standard for research on how children can get in the way of women's success in academe. Before Mr. Goulden produced the national data, there had been only anecdotes.

The result has been to turn him into one of academe's go-to people on the question of how colleges can help faculty members balance their work and family lives. While he is primarily a number cruncher, Mr. Goulden has used his data to push efforts that have put the University of California system on the leading edge of family-friendly policies in higher education.

It should be said that Mr. Goulden does not work alone. In fact, he is the man behind the woman -- in this case, Mary Ann Mason, dean of the graduate division on the Berkeley campus -- who led the push to mine the data on work-and-family issues. They wrote "Do Babies Matter?" together.

Mr. Goulden's talents lie in designing ways to analyze complicated data: knowing what numbers to use and what questions to ask. His research is based on federal surveys of 160,000 people who earned Ph.D.'s from 1978 to 1984. Mr. Goulden started his analysis with a small grant and caught the attention of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is now financing more of his research, as well as efforts to change policies in the University of California system.

What he found is that women who have babies within five years of earning their doctorates are 30 percent less likely than women without babies to ever secure a tenure-track position. Of those women who have babies early on, only 56 percent ever earn tenure. Fatherhood, by contrast, tends to enhance the academic prospects of men. Of those who become fathers early, 77 percent eventually earn tenure -- a greater percentage than men who have not become fathers.

Mr. Goulden also looked at the data from the opposite perspective, and again found evidence that, for women, family and an academic career do not mix. Of those women who take academic jobs without having children first, he found, only one-third ever end up having them. Indeed, female faculty members are much less likely to have kids than are women in general. Of full-time female professors from 38 to 41 years old, he said, only 42 percent had children in their households in 2000, compared with 72 percent of women the same age with at least a bachelor's degree.

The "Babies Matter" study has made Mr. Goulden a hot commodity on the academic lecture circuit. But professors do not always warm quickly to Mr. Goulden's data. "I think academics like to think their house is in order, that academia is a pretty perfect world," he says. "But we are able with this data set to show that there are serious problems for women."

At Berkeley, he and Ms. Mason are using the data to push for benefits that would allow professors to work part time while on the tenure track. They also encourage search committees to overlook gaps in a prospective faculty member's academic career when he or she may have been spending time at home caring for young children. And the two researchers are meeting with leaders of other universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, to encourage similar policy changes.

Meanwhile, Mr. Goulden has personally confronted the baby problem in academe. He and his wife, Regan Rhea, met in the doctoral program in history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But she has not finished her Ph.D. since giving birth to the couple's two young sons.

"The bitter irony," says Mr. Goulden, "is that I'm working on work-family issues where I'm embarking upon these studies on gender effects, and Regan has essentially been caught in these patterns."