Balancing Act

Easing the Grad-Student Baby Blues

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person It's Not a Zero-Sum Game Are a moderately heavy teaching load and an active research program mutually exclusive? First Person Pothead Ph.D. This is most definitely not a cautionary tale. First Person Subject Experts Need Not Apply Recent job postings and hires suggest that many academic libraries are losing interest in hiring humanities Ph.D.'s. Career News When Laptops Disappear Stolen computers containing sensitive data are a growing and costly problem for colleges. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Joan C. Williams

It probably wasn't in the same league as Dear Abby's mail, but I did receive more responses to my last column on the graduate-student baby blues than on any article I have ever written, academic or popular. I clearly hit a chord on a topic -- the difficulties of having children while pursuing a Ph.D. -- that gets little attention.

The letters and follow-up conversations ran the gamut, but one letter from a female academic illustrated in particular the sensitive politics surrounding work and family issues on campuses.

It began, "I believe that everyone should be treated fairly and have seen many people (male and female) with children able to deal with the rigors of both graduate school and academia." However, she continued, "Having children is a choice. ... If someone chooses to have children, then they must accept that they may have to also choose to move away from academia if they are unable to devote the time necessary." The writer added: "I have also seen people that have children vote to raise insurance premiums (by over 50 percent) for all students in order to have insurance for their children. While I sympathize with their financial situation, I do not wish to see my insurance premiums raised for their choice."

These are serious issues. Let me first address the choice argument. When gays enter the military, they are given a choice, right? They can either remain closeted and continue their careers, or they can live an open life and leave the service. Choice and discrimination are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes -- in fact, often -- choices occur within a discriminatory framework. When institutions discriminate, any discrimination that results from private choices should not be blamed on those who make the choices.

At another point in her e-mailed letter, the writer mentions the relative poverty in which most graduate students live -- on stipends of less than $20,000 a year -- as a reason why single grad students shouldn't have to fork over higher premiums to help support the families of married ones. But the poverty argument only highlights the extent to which having children is still coded as a private choice, properly financed by the family, and the family alone -- rather than as a social phenomenon that needs close attention because it is a central engine of gender inequality.

Not covering health insurance for domestic partners of gay students, I suspect, also would be less expensive than restricting health-care coverage to married couples. But here the poverty argument would not be made. Nor should it be. The notion that society should be structured to systematically privilege straight over gay couples now is understood to be discriminatory if one is committed to principles of equality.

The same should be true of the decision to exclude coverage of dependents on the grounds that having children is a private frolic, like having a penchant for hang gliding.

Having children is part of life, demographically if not personally. Refusing to acknowledge that fact forces graduate-student moms to be married, and to be married to someone who is "working to pay the health insurance" (to quote another letter I received). It encourages graduate-student dads to keep insisting on special treatment on the grounds that their families expect them to be providers. Both sides of that equation perpetuate gender inequality.

All that said, the letter from the single student highlights the painfulness of work and family issues within academe. Many, many women "forget to have children" in a frenzy to get tenure. They don't forget, of course; many regret their loss. For those women to see their insurance premiums raised to subsidize women lucky enough to "have it all" can be exquisitely painful.

Academe also is full of women who are not childless but "childfree": They have made a proud and conscious decision to invent full adult lives without children. That is a courageous path for a women in a society where women without children often find themselves treated as the objects of pathos or scorn.

Ending the shameful treatment of childfree women is an integral part of changing the conditions of motherhood. Motherhood is a hard job that should not be undertaken by people who don't really want to do it. Who knows this better than mothers? As a mother, I am an enthusiastic member of the movement to make the world more accepting of the childfree. But the way to do that is not to reinforce and perpetuate the hostile climate for mothers.

All of those political issues will have to be faced, and faced sensitively, in order for us to realize real -- as opposed to symbolic and ineffectual -- gender equality. We can realize that goal both by decreasing gender pressure on men to be the sole family provider, and by decreasing gender pressure on women to leave academe because they cannot be the ideal worker available 24/7/40 -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 40 years straight.

Setting aside the politics, it's time to suggest a few policies needed to redress the family-hostile conditions in academe. The following suggestions are adapted from a proposal developed by a group of students at a major research university:

Make clear that anti-family comments are unacceptable. It should be taboo for a professor to treat family responsibilities -- caring for elders or ill partners as well as for children -- as evidence of a graduate student's lack of professionalism. In fact, in Back v. Hastings on Hudson, a landmark legal decision, a federal court recently held that assuming that mothers are less committed to their jobs is gender stereotyping in violation of federal law, even without evidence that men in a similar situation were treated differently. The key news for employers is that that ruling may well make lawsuits on such grounds easier.

Offer short-term, flexible child care to graduate students. Too often universities respond to the need for child care by providing only a few expensive slots in a professional child-care center. The problem with that is twofold: Most graduate students cannot afford such high-cost care, and most don't need full-time child care. What they would prefer are more part-time options, such as a child care co-op.

Offer affordable health-insurance coverage for dependents. That is a huge issue for students, whose stipends rarely seem to exceed $25,000 a year, and often are under $20,000.

Students point out that the families of university staff members can sign their dependents onto health insurance at group rates that typically are much lower -- sometimes less than half -- of the rates charged to cover students' dependents. Often the insurance offered to graduate students is not only more expensive, but the coverage is worse -- despite the fact that these students also work for the university as teaching and research assistants.

For institutions, the problem is, of course, the expense. Holding a vote to decide whether to raise premiums to cover graduate-students' dependents may be a good solution, with cost-sharing borne by universities wherever possible. But let me just point out that at some of the richest private universities in the country, graduate students with families have to turn to programs designed to provide health insurance for the poor. Does that make sense?

Give families a higher priority in the housing lottery. At some institutions, single people who sign up as roommates are eligible for "family housing." That means that some families may well not get family housing, particularly if the priority systems favor newer grad students over more advanced ones. One approach is to give families priority, on the grounds that moving children is disruptive, and that families with children may well need access to the high-quality public schools available in university towns.

Offer flexible parental leave. Surely universities can afford to pay for four weeks of parental leave for anyone who will certify, on a form provided by the university benefits office, that he or she is providing 20 or more hours of child care a week to a newly born or adopted child. Similarly, professors should be required to give the option to defer general examinations for up to one academic year to graduate students who have or adopt children.

Allow part-time work. University regulations should require administrators to allow advisers to permit any graduate student with children under 18 (or with other significant care-giving responsibilities) to work part time instead of full time at least for a semester, and possibly for a year.

Advisers should not be required to allow part-time work where a flexible schedule would jeopardize their own research, but should be advised of the potential for gender stereotyping and the need to avoid it. That would avoid situations where an adviser agrees to let a graduate student work part time, only to be overruled by an administrator.

How are administrators to know which policies constitute gender stereotyping and which just reflect societal realities? I'll deal with that question in a future column.