Photo by S. Siegel (Margaret Mead at New York Academy of Science, 1968)
Sadly, I think the answer to this question is still, “yes,” especially in higher education. Most of my clients are women, and I am surprised at how often issues specific to women emerge in conversations with them about tenure and promotion, how to juggle work and family obligations, and finding time to take care of themselves enough to replenish the excitement they initially had for their own research. Mind you, I am not saying that the life of a male professor is easy, just that some issues remain specific to women in academia. For those brave men that choose to read on, I encourage you to think about some of the institutional barriers your female colleagues might be experiencing.
A major issue remains: childbearing and childrearing. Because academia like many other sectors of our economy first evolved during the post-agricultural industrial revolution with the expectation that men would work in the public sector, while women tended to the home sector [aside, to my anthropologist and sociologist friends: I am painting this with the broadest possible brush and not the nuanced way in which you folks would understand this]. The academic pathway to promotion, modeled on the German apprenticeship ideal for training to teach in higher education, assumes the academic has a spouse at home caring for children. Women who attended graduate school in their twenties, then entered teaching in their late twenties or early thirties, are often ready to start a family just as the tenure clock starts ticking in time with their biological clocks.
Very few universities have actually come to terms with women on the tenure track having children: they are generally expected to manage teaching, research and service work without a break or acknowledgment of the biological cost of childbirth itself. Only a few institutions even offer the possibility of stopping the tenure clock for a least a year after childbirth. The result can be an even-more-than-usually- stressed-out professor, with competing multiple responsibilities vying for attention.
Clients in this situation may need to reconfigure their schedules, learn how to approach their department chairs or deans for some kind of time release, and allow themselves to ask their spouses, if they have them, for help with caring for their children. Culturally, many women find this extremely difficult, anticipating that they can do it all, only to collapse after a few years of living like this. (For a recent blog post in Inside Higher Education about this very issue, see: Should you expand your family on the tenure track? )
In addition, women still have to deal with unspoken sexism, including the assumption that women should be better caretakers of their students and their colleagues than male academics are. This is most endemic in the hard sciences. Questions from clients emerge around whether a woman should strive to be a better team player, or sometimes to work more competitively than feels natural to her. Moses Chao, current President of Society for Neuroscience (SfN), wrote in the Neuroscience Quarterly (Summer 2012) that:
US surveys show a dramatic drop-off in the number of women in neuroscience training after graduate and post-doctoral training—from 54-46% of trainees to 29% of faculty who achieve tenure-track positions.
Chao postulates a combination of factors contribute to these statistics, including “unconscious bias [against women] as demonstrated in the types of recommendation letters they received compared to male counterparts.” According to University of Washington doctoral student Laura Meyers, women earn on average 6.9 percent less than do men in similar appointments in higher education, based on 2004 data. Meyers also found a “significant and negative connection” between a field becoming more female and the salaries its members earn.
Meanwhile, many more women continue to enroll and graduate from institutions of higher learning with bachelor, master and doctoral degrees, increasing their [theoretical] earning potential. According to the US Census 2010, between 2006 and 2008, 32.7% of women between 25 and 34 had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 25.8% of men. In the US media, we hear rumblings that women are actually earning more than men now overall. However, if the facts are carefully examined, this has more to do with women forced to become primary breadwinners in their families when the men get laid off.
Evidence from the public sector in Europe indicates that the magic number to address women’s issues in a proactive way, including salary parity and policies around childbearing, is 30% or more females in positions of governance, says Linda Tarr-Whelan. This is the tipping point for critical mass in considering issues that specifically relate to women from a female perspective, everything from childcare policies to where a well should be located when women are the primary carriers of water for domestic use. At present, the current worldwide rate for female participation in countrywide parliaments is 15% (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA).
Interestingly, in the political arena, a second concept of equality is gaining relevance and support, sometimes called the “equality of result”:
The argument is that real equal opportunity does not exist just because formal barriers are removed. Direct discrimination and a complex pattern of hidden barriers prevent women from being selected as candidates and getting their share of political influence. http://www.quotaproject.org/aboutQuotas.cfm#pros
This idea bears further scrutiny for the improvement in the lives of women in the hallowed halls of academe.
Tags: academia, academic, career, happiness at work, Women in academia
