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  • Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success & Sacrifice
  • Barbara K. Townsend
Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success & Sacrifice, by Maike Ingrid Philipsen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. 368 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-470-25700.

In 1870 women constituted 12% of faculty members in United States higher education institutions. The representation of women faculty rose to a high of almost 28% by 1940 and then declined to a low of 22% by 1960. By 1980 it was 26% (Solomon, 1985, p. 133). The 1980 figure is of particular note since in that same year, women students were the majority (51%) of undergraduate students, [End Page 595] a situation that continues to this day. As of 2005, women comprised 40.6% of full-time and 45% of all full- and part-time faculty members in U.S. higher education institutions (NCES, 2007). It is these statistics that illustrate a need for a book on the successes and sacrifices of women faculty members.

For her book about women faculty, Philipsen set a goal of ascertaining and reporting "the women's experiences with balancing professional and personal lives in the context of higher education" (p. 261). To do so, she drew upon a diverse group of women faculty, who varied on such dimensions as discipline, family status (married, single, childless, with children), employment status (full- or part-time faculty), race, sexual orientation, age, and nationality. Of the 46 women in her qualitative study, 29 are white, 9 are African-American, and 8 are immigrants, each from a different county. Additionally, she initially emphasized two major factors potentially affecting their experiences: career stage (early, middle, or late) and institutional type. For the latter factor, she selected women faculty from a community college, an historically black university, a private comprehensive university, and two research universities, with all institutions being in the same mid-Atlantic state.

In the book's introduction, Philipsen lays out her reasons for conducting the study, its methodological details, and the book's organization. She also tells her own story as a woman in the academy, including her perspective that as a married woman with children, she found "a healthy balance" (p. 12) in her life only after divorcing her first husband. Her story is just the first of many that pound home the theme that female academics with children have great difficulty in establishing a balanced life, partly because childcare needs are viewed both by society and the women in the study as the primary responsibility of mothers.

Each of the first three chapters of the five-chapter book details a different stage in women faculty members' careers and describes personal and institutional "enabling factors" (p. 70) such as supportive colleagues and family members, as well as various "coping strategies" (p. 70) such as keeping to-do lists and taking along family members to conferences. Chapter one describes the situations of those in the pre-tenure or early stage of their career. Tenure is seen as the major issue for these women, partly because of "the curse of ill-defined expectations" (p. 21) that most of the women experience. Those women without children do not express as much difficulty in this career state as do those with parenting responsibilities or those desiring to become pregnant, who face the stress of deciding when to become pregnant, if pregnancy is still possible at their age.

Chapter two discusses mid-career women faculty members, or those who have achieved tenure if it is an option or who have moved past early-career issues and are more settled in their careers. While childcare remains an issue, becoming pregnant and giving birth no longer is. The mid-career women in this study express how they seem to be constantly working. Those with children indicate how they fail to meet the stereotypical expectations of mothers, such as baking cookies. The extent to which their partners support the women, particularly in taking care of the house and the children, is a key factor in how well the women believe they are doing professionally and personally. Those women with "stay-at-home husbands" (p. 91) find it easier to have a balanced...

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