Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower by Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden (review)

Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between gender, family formation, and academic careers. A major strength of this book is that it brings together several important lines of research on work and family in academia. Much other research in this area either focuses on faculty mothers (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012), institutional family-friendly policies (Sullivan, Hollenshead, & Smith, 2004), faculty fathers (Sallee, 2013), or both mothers and fathers (Colbeck & Drago, 2007). Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden focus on women and men throughout their academic careers and discuss family friendly policies as well.

Mary Ann Mason was Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California when she and her colleagues began their research in 2001 by investigating the impact of marriage and children on pre- and post-tenure faculty members. They also turned the question of impact around, exploring whether academic careers affect the likelihood of faculty members being married or having children. Do Babies Matter? thus offers a thorough investigation of “effects of family formation on the academic careers of men and women across their professional lives” (p. 1). Over the course of ten years, they expanded their focus to include graduate students, postdocs, academic job seekers, and non-tenure stream instructors and researchers. They also examined the impact of gender on marriage and family for mid-career faculty and on decisions to retire. Chapters follow the chronological progression of faculty careers.

The scope and quality of the research are additional strengths of this easy-to-read, relatively short, and well-annotated volume. Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden used two primary data sources with large sample sizes. The first is the national Survey of Earned Doctorates (SDR) and includes information about the lives and careers of thousands of men and women who earned Ph.D.s in the US in all fields from 1978 through 1995, and in the sciences and social sciences through 2003. The second source of data came from the nine largest campuses of the University of California system and included surveys of tenure-stream faculty (2002 and 2003), doctoral students (2006 and 2007), and postdoctoral fellows (2009). The authors also surveyed contingent faculty, academic researchers, and other academic staff at UC Berkeley in 2009. Sophisticated statistical analyses of these data sets are supplemented by information about work/family policies from federal funding agencies, leading research universities, census data, faculty comments, and interviews. Faculty voices bring vividness and poignancy to the statistical analyses.

The authors show the challenges for many faculty, especially women with children under the age of six, to succeed at each stage of the academic career. Following graduate school for example, women with young children are more likely than other women or men to opt for contingent or non-academic positions than to pursue tenure track positions. Having young children complicates the tenure track job search for women. Each child decreases the overall salary that women will earn by 1% compared to men over their tenure-stream careers. The only decision that is consistent between men and women with and without families seems to be the decision of when to retire.

There are three weaknesses in reporting the data analyses. The large data sets that form the foundation for much of the analysis differ by (1) scope (the SDR is nation-wide while UC surveys only Californians), (2) by type of institution (the SDR includes all institution types and the UC surveys include only research universities), and (3) by timing. Because of the first two differences, readers cannot always be sure if findings apply to faculty in all institutions or just to...