Drew Gilpin Faust’s appointment as president of Harvard University has seriously dented the academic glass ceiling. The appointment of Harvard’s first female president means that women will now lead half of the eight institutions that make up the Ivy League.
But focusing on highly accomplished women such as Faust misses a larger point. Sure, women are taking faculty positions in record numbers, but most of those jobs are contingent, meaning they are fixed-term appointments not on the tenure track.
The road to success in academe, however, begins with a tenure-track position of the sort Faust held at the University of Pennsylvania.
Adjunct faculty members are mainly hired to teach numerous courses for a pittance. They have neither the time nor the resources needed for the sort of path-breaking research that led Faust to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and eventually to the Harvard presidency. Indeed, in seminars on balancing work and family life that I have given at dozens of major universities, including Harvard, I have never met a contingent faculty member who moved onto the tenure track, although I am certain a few must exist somewhere.
And academe continues to hire contingent instructors at breakneck speed. According to a 2006 report on gender equity from the American Association of University Professors, 43 percent of faculty members at American institutions worked under contingent contracts in 1975, but by 2003, that figure had soared to 65 percent. Women were at the heart of that expansion: 73 percent of female faculty members are non-tenure-track instructors. As a result, the number of women moving up the pipeline behind Faust is woefully small.
Neither the accolades for Harvard’s appointment nor the deafening silence regarding the large numbers of women making up the adjunct pool are accidental.
Recall the 2005 event that triggered Faust’s appointment. The university’s president at the time, Larry Summers, suggested, among other claims, that relatively few young women were prepared to make the “near total commitments to their work” required of successful academics. He also suggested that men may hold a biological advantage in the pursuit of science and engineering careers. The anger generated by those comments almost certainly contributed to his resignation.
But there was a grain of truth in the commitment remark. The same AAUP study found that more than two-thirds of the women who teach in contingent positions work part time. Sex discrimination certainly accounts for some part of that, but many women undoubtedly choose part-time employment to make time for their families.
Why is that truth ignored or, when it is mentioned, met with hostility?
As I argue in Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life (Dollars & Sense, 2007), norms surrounding our ideas about motherhood and ideal workers provide an explanation. The former leads us to expect women to bear and rear children, to take care of the ill, elderly, and those with disabilities, and to do so for low or no pay, and without public recognition.
In contrast, as Summers suggested, ideal workers exhibit extreme levels of commitment to career, and work long days, with late nights and weekends at the office, and with 24/7 availability. Ideal workers are lauded, promoted, and paid lavishly; the long hours that mothers pull are ignored, except for the occasional box of chocolates.
Those norms collide in the academic workplace. To succeed, men must take a tenure-track position and function as ideal workers. Women must do the same, but at far greater cost to their personal lives.
For example, my research with Carol L. Colbeck, an associate professor of education and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, used a national sample of roughly 4,000 faculty members in chemistry and English departments to show that tenured and tenure-track women in academe are significantly more likely than men to avoid marriage, limit the number of children they raise, delay a second child until after tenure, and, among parents, miss important events in their children’s lives. Women who choose the tenure track often sacrifice family life on the altar of career.
What Summers missed are those sacrifices. Indeed, the way he broached the subject of family commitments represented a significant threat to the careers of female faculty members everywhere -- an accusation that women are really “just moms.”
Institutions such as the Ohio State University, the University of California, and Wellesley College have responded to those problems with a “half-time tenure track.” That system allows caregivers to avoid the long hours of ideal workers while still producing high-quality research and teaching. Enhanced child-care support, parental leave options, and research grants for those with caring responsibilities could also help.
All of those options would make the tenure track more viable for many women who now believe -- on reasonable grounds -- that a tenure-track career is inconsistent with a meaningful and full family life. Universities could hire and retain many of the talented people currently now relegated to the mommy track of contingent status.
Faust understands all of that. Indeed, she was part of a Harvard task force that responded to the Summers gaffe, and the task force covered much of that same ground. Unfortunately, as a woman, Faust is probably in a weaker political position than Summers to push through such initiatives at Harvard. She might face accusations of favoring, well ... mothers.