Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success and Sacrifice (review)

As a department chair, I am reminded daily of the many ways that the work of faculty members remains gendered. Whether it be the department meeting in which the opinions of female faculty are ignored or demeaned or the student comments on teaching evaluations that compliment women for being nice and caring and the male faculty for being brilliant, the academy still, by and large, privileges male values.

I am always hopeful that new scholarship will offer fresh insights into the problems faced by female faculty, the reasons misogynist views remain entrenched, and suggestions of innovative ways of making the academy more women-friendly without sacrificing its core values.

Challenges of the Faculty Career by Maike Ingrid Philipsen joins a spate of recent books that are trying to do just that. These include The Balancing Act by Susan Bracken et al.; Mama, PhD by Elena Evans and Caroline Grant; Motherhood: The Elephant in the Laboratory by Emily Monosson; and Establishing the Family-Friendly Campus by Jaime Lester and Margaret Sallee. Philipsen’s purpose is to illuminate how women faculty members successfully balance work and family—how they combine work and life outside the academy and across the career.

Her premise is that “the persisting gender gap has much to do with the relationship between women’s professional and personal lives” (p. 2). She argues that the topic is understudied, that appropriate policies are lacking, and that there are few studies based on firsthand accounts of women’s experiences. Philipsen sees her work as broadening existing work by focusing on women’s experiences across the career span and including women who are not married and do not have children.

The book is based on in-depth interviews with 37 female faculty members at different career stages, with different family situations at five institutions representing the various types of colleges and universities in the Mid-Atlantic region. She presents interview findings and conclusions in six chapters.

The first three chapters form the core of the findings and are structured around career stages: early, mid, and late. Not surprisingly, women faculty members’ early career was dominated by some general concerns—ill-defined expectations for tenure—but most significantly by the challenges of balancing academic pressures with raising young children. Philipsen argues, as do the authors cited above, that this is a burden carried more heavily by women faculty than by men. Philipsen also describes factors that help women to be successful at this stage, such as mentors, advisors, family members, and exercise.

Mid-career was less dominated by challenges of family. According to Philipsen, women at this stage have better-developed coping strategies and are more confident about what they will and won’t do. The struggle between work and personal lives continues, however. The interviewees in late career were happy with the balance achieved and reflected on past enablers.

Chapter 4 highlights comparisons that the interviewees made between themselves and their male colleagues and earlier generations of women academics. The latter observations reminded women in the study, as they should remind those who were not, that they have benefited from the struggles of women who preceded them. In Chapter 5, Philipsen reports the recommendations of her interviewees for change: clarify the tenure process and expectations, reevaluate workload issues, create better child care on campus, and redesign tenure in ways that take into account the interrelation of work and personal lives.

Importantly, she notes that policies geared toward women tend to be stigmatizing so her recommendations are designed to apply to male faculty members as well. She particularly emphasizes what she calls the exemplar model for tenure, which includes extending the length of the probationary period “either indefinitely or for a very long time” (p. 243) for all faculty and for creating a sample of diverse portfolios of successful scholars. A faculty member could seek tenure at any time and would have the portfolios as guides; but how this...