lactation room

My university just established a lactation room in my building. It's certainly not convenient for everyone in the (very very large) university, but it's a start. And not a bad place to start--the English department has been producing babies at an astounding rate lately.

academics with children

Bitch, Ph.D. recently responded to a reader’s question about the feasibility of getting a Ph.D. while raising three children—LOTS of discussion there. Academom and Geeky Mom have also responded on their own blogs.

To add my two cents, of course it’s hard to get a graduate degree and raise children. It’s hard to have any career and raise children. Some people will succeed as if they don’t even have children while others will not finish their degrees. That happens among people who don’t have children, too. I do think that in some places women can be taken less seriously if they have children, but I have not experienced that in my department.

The problem is not just with academia but with the general expectation in most careers that employees will be ideal workers who can devote almost unlimited time to their jobs without interference from family responsibilities (read Joan Williams’s Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to do About It). If you’re a mother who performs as an ideal worker, then you must be neglecting your children. If your family responsibilities interfere with your work because you have to take off when kids are sick or you can’t work after five because you have to be home, then you are not committed to your career and you don’t deserve rewards like promotions or fellowships. Some of these considerations come into play in grad school, with course work and deadlines, others come up in the job search (who has time to publish when you’re doing all you can to meet your degree requirements?), but I think it is even more intensified on the tenure track (but I can’t personally attest to this yet).

I think that I have done well raising one child while in grad school—we’ll soon see how I do with two. It is doable. But I expect that my responsibilities as a mother will effect my career in the long-term. I am on a race to finish my dissertation before my funding runs out, hopefully publishing something along the way. But I’m certain that I will take a year longer than I would have without kids. And when I look for a job, I am not hoping to end up at a major research university, especially if that means moving multiple times to get there. I don’t want to the intense pressure of two books for tenure because I don’t want to put in the hours for it. I want to be with my family and I want to be happy when I’m with them, not worried about my job. That is my choice, you say? Well, maybe, but what kind of choice is that? My career OR my kids? I have adapted my notion of success in this career to something that allows me to teach and do my work and have plenty of time for my family. I don’t believe I can find this ideal at an elite university, so I do not aspire to work at an elite university. I know that you can probably name me some people who have done it all, but I don’t see that in my life. So I intend to accept the glass-mommy-ceiling, but that doesn’t mean I’m always happy about it.

For more on the effect of motherhood on academic careers, see Mary Ann Mason’s Do Babies Matter? project.

Academic babies, pt.2: Quick ramblings

I don't have time to develop much more of my topic from yesterday, so this is going to probably read like a string of disjointed ideas. I'll point out a few points from Mary Ann Mason of Berkeley, whose Do Babies Matter? project I linked to yesterday. The short answers are, for women, yes, and for men, no. Women with children are less likely to get a tenure-track job and then are less likely to get tenure than women without children. Men with children are slightly more likely to get tenure than men without children. Hmm. The gender gap is not that surprising because mothers are still the primary caregivers more often than men. And, of course, there's that whole pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding thing. As for timing, it seems that having a child within five years of earning a Ph.D. has the most impact on a woman's career. Which all goes back to the fact that our whole notion of career advancement is based on a man's biology--men are much more likely to be able to have children in their forties after establishing their careers, and women who want children, of course, take a big risk when they wait that long. Mason has some proposed solutions on her website as part of the University of California's Family Friendly Initiative, including high quality childcare slots, limited part-time options, and re-entry post-doc fellowships for Ph.D.s who have taken time off for family reasons and wish to return.

To look at things from a different perspective, academia seems to be a career that is relatively conducive to family life--moreso than say, my husband's career, restaurant management. As much as we want to share responsibilities, I am the primary caregiver of our daughter because he is at work 50-60 hours per week, and it's not very flexible. Planning for my upcoming conference trip has been--well, it has yet to be successfully planned. If I did not have childcare--really great, really expensive childcare--I would not be able to do this. But that is true of most careers.

From where I sit, the whole grad student parent thing is totally doable--I've been doing it for almost two years, and with our share of ups and downs, things have been good. In a couple of years, when I'm trying to figure out how to go on a job search, I anticipate major problems, especially considering how hard it's been to get to a conference. If I had extended family nearby, that would help tremendously, but one of the difficult facts of academic life is that you don't usually get to live close to family.

As much as trying to get tenure terrifies me, I obviously can't speak to that now and really don't have the space in my mind to worry about it. I wish I had some great point to make with this post, but I have to get on to other matters and don't have time to write anything with any coherence.

Timing of academic babies, pt.1

Thanks to everyone for the well-wishes attached to my last post. And I am happy to see that some bloggers I really enjoy reading are also reading me. Bonus.

So the frequent question of WHEN??? to have children in an academic career has come up again lately. I know a lot of bloggers have addressed this but I recently got an email about it, and my handy dandy tracker tells me that someone surfed in from Google using the search terms "timing + motherhood + phd." The conversation has no end. And it is enormously important to many people.

There is a baby boom coming in my department--the halls of this floor will be downright comical in the fall. Several are in my class, which makes sense--we were a large class and many of us were married or in stable relationships when we arrived. Now we are approaching ABD status, and that seems like a good time for a baby--out of course work, flexible schedule and deadlines. I took job search into consideration with my planning. We wanted two kids, and while it was complicated caring for a newborn baby while still taking three classes and teaching one, it seemed more difficult to go on the job market with a nursing baby. Now's the time to "complete" the family, so the second child will be weaned by the time the job search begins.

The decision to have children as a student was based partially on advice from professors who said it's easier to deal with a new baby in grad school than when you're trying to make tenure. Makes sense. But age was also a factor--my husband had a fear of being an "old dad"--he was 31 when RB was born.

The reality is that there's just not a good time. Having children is monumentally inconvenient. You have to learn to make hard choices, and career cannot always come first anymore. That seems obvious, but when, like many grad students, you have single-mindedly pursued something for so long, it's not always easy to accept that. You come to a new understanding of your own limitations, which can also be hard to take. After all, we've been told since we were born that we could have it all, right?

This is getting long, so I'll add more tomorrow. Here's a link to some articles on the effect of having children on academic careers. And I feel like I should add since I'm dropping this on a negative tone--I love being a mom and I'm pretty darn satisfied with my life--obviously, or I wouldn't be having another child.

A talent for scheduling

When I decided to have a child, I wanted to deliver a baby in the summer so that it would be easier to deal with teaching and classes--I was still taking a full nine-hour course load at the time. I decided to get pregnant in October so I could have a baby in July. And that's exactly what happened.

So then I decided to take a bigger gamble--shoot for the four week break between fall and spring semesters...and here we are! Baby's due in December! Even my womb respects the academic calendar.

Things will be different this time around--I'm not taking courses and I've got a whole year of teaching web-based classes ahead of me. And a toddler at my knees. Hello to a whole new world.

Breaking the baby news

Okay--so here's the post that's been simmering for a while.I was talking with a friend recently who is considering trying to have a child, and she made the comment, which I have heard and said before, that she was worried about "breaking it" to her committee. Like it's bad news. I'm going to make a huge generalization and say that this is the general feeling of grad student moms and maybe career moms in general. Even when the mom is happy and the pregnancy is planned, there is a fear of breaking the news to professors, administrators, and especially committee members. What's this all about?

I can just speak from my own experience and why I hesitated to tell professors and even other students that I was pregnant--so long, in fact, that most of my teachers actually asked me before I told them (at which point I was tempted to say, "no, just going a little heavy on the french fries"). I was worried not that I would not be able to handle my responsibilities and stay "on-track" (that was a completely separate worry) but that I would not be taken seriously as a student and scholar. I was wearing my outside obligations and commitments right on my belly. No one has ever treated me badly or dismissed me in an overt way, and my advisor has been particularly supportive, telling me about his own experience having two kids while in grad school. So I wonder if these concerns are based on my own insecurities or if there have been subtle messages from members of the department that have made me feel this way.

So these concerns lead to the topic of pressure to perform. Because I feel insecure about being taken seriously, I feel an intense need to prove myself, to be super student, super scholar, and super mom. And every time someone compliments me on managing all of these responsibilties well, I feel torn between feeling satisfied with doing my job well and feeling intensified pressure to perform well and never break a sweat (if anyone is looking, that is). My advisor has called me "remarkably efficient," which is a wonderful, gratifying, and validating compliment, but one that I feel as if I have to live up to or I will let him down. I know that he would feel awful to think that he caused any stress because he has been exceptionally supportive, so why do I feel this pressure? Do men feel this pressure, too?

As much as I know that I am generating a lot of these anxieties myself, the reality is that even if the culture of my department is supportive to families, the larger culture does not take mothers as seriously as career women who have no children (see the post titled "substantial post coming soon" for links on the Mommy track).

And a funny thing is happening in my department--lots of students are having babies, getting pregnant, trying to get pregnant, and so there is about to be a whole lot of big bellies and little babies around here. Does that decrease the problem or does it intensify prejudice against those in the "Mommy club"?