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The whitewashed classroom in the physics building at the University of California, Berkeley, is quite ordinary looking. But the questions by the crowd of graduate students this Friday lunchtime are unusually emotional and plaintive, and it’s quickly clear that they have come to this event for more than just the free pizza.
“It seems to me that most women at high-powered universities don’t have children. Do you perceive that to be true?” one of them asks the speaker, Kristine Lang, a Berkeley alumna with a Ph.D. in physics who chose to teach at a small liberal-arts college because she thought it would be easier to combine a career there with having a child—the now-five-month-old son who sits fidgeting on her lap.
Asks another: “Have the people you were in graduate school with had children?”
Says a third, “You’ve had a child before you have tenure, which I heard is a really risky thing to do.”
Still another wants to know, “Had you taken the university route, would you have made different decisions about family?”
Lauren Tompkins, who organized the gathering as president of Berkeley’s Society for Women in the Physical Sciences, is used to these kinds of questions. Whenever female academics come to speak to these women doctoral students, she says, no matter what the topic, “The students always ask, ‘Did you have a kid and, if so, how?’”
This is, it turns out, suddenly one of the hottest questions everywhere in higher education. Even as women overtake men among Americans receiving doctorates, a substantial body of new research shows that they are being discouraged from careers in academia because the timing and requirements of tenure make it so hard to raise families. In response, some universities have found a compelling reason to consider major changes in the tenure system—their own self-interest.
Not only are they competing for the best prospective scholars to replace a growing number of faculty retirees; these universities are also wary of the kind of bad publicity that comes with missteps such as former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers’s fateful contention that innate differences between the sexes might be responsible for the smaller number of men than women in the sciences and math. Pressure to change the system has gained momentum from Summers’s comments themselves. They drew attention to the issue more than anything else could have. (“It’s been wonderful. It’s been great,” exclaims one female dean who has long worked to drum up interest in the topic.) Another impetus is men’s growing involvement in child rearing—and, therefore, their increasing stake in workplace flexibility.
Meanwhile, last fall the Sloan Foundation awarded $250,000 “accelerator grants” to expand programs seen as models of how institutions can make it easier for women academics to balance family responsibilities with their careers. These “career flexibility” grants went to six schools: Duke University, Lehigh University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Davis, the University of Florida, and the University of Washington.
Of the winners, Duke was cited for letting faculty work reduced hours to handle family obligations, while Lehigh provides money to help faculty increase research productivity and attend conferences. It also encourages collaboration among faculty working less than full time. The Sloan grants will pay for Berkeley to create “family-friendly toolkits” for managers and deans and for UC-Davis to launch educational campaigns to promote the use of existing benefits for faculty parents. And the University of Washington plans an eight-point plan, to be completed by 2008, that will include leadership-development workshops for department chairs [Editor's note: described in the next issue of Change], paid parental leave for faculty, a peer-support group for new mothers, and expanded infant and child care.
But advocates of making academic careers easier for women say doing so will take more than just longer maternity leaves. It will take significant changes in America’s higher-education culture so that women no longer suspect—regardless of what the faculty handbook might say—that they’ll be seen as weak for taking time off to raise a child.
Which is exactly what the speaker in that Berkeley classroom, Kristine Lang, says happens now. “I’ll tell you what makes me angry,” Lang says after the students have left, having finally exhausted their supply of questions. “What makes me angry is, let’s say you want to have a baby and you want to take six months off. Because you want that time, you’re screwed.”
Jon Marcus is the U.S. higher-education correspondent for the Times (U.K.) Higher Education Supplement. An author and former editor of Boston Magazine, he has also contributed to magazines and newspapers, including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Washington Post.
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