Failing Families, Failing Science: Work-Family Conflict in Academic Science by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Anne E. Lincoln (review)

Why do we lose women across each stage of the STEM academic pipeline, from majoring in these fields as undergraduates to reaching the status of full professor? This has been the million-dollar question undergirding efforts to enhance the representation of women in these fields over the past few decades. The National Science Foundation itself has invested considerable funds through a variety of grants (e.g., ADVANCE institutional transformation grants) to identify the main causes and implement remedies to address this problem. Alongside such efforts, a voluminous scholarship has developed that identifies barriers to STEM women's progress. One central culprit that emerges is the design of academic careers in the STEM fields, which makes it difficult for STEM faculty members to be successful scientists while remaining active participants in family responsibilities. This problem is at the heart of Failing Families, Failing Science, by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund and Anne E. Lincoln. With both survey data and qualitative interviews from biologists and physicists in highly ranked US research universities, the authors paint a complex picture of the issues academic scientists encounter as they build their careers. The central call to action centers around the need for academic science to move away from norms of complete devotion to scientific careers. This mind-set is increasingly mismatched with the goals of newer cohorts of scientists—both men and women—who are troubled by norms and structures that make it difficult to have meaningful responsibilities outside academic science. Unless such change is realized, their work suggests that the leaking pipeline problem is likely to become more severe across time, as younger scientists who desire more holistic lives are increasingly likely to turn to careers outside academic science.

In a landscape increasingly filled with books and articles about women in the STEM fields, Ecklund and Lincoln's work offers two main contributions. The first contribution is a forceful argument that the work-family issues encountered by people in the STEM fields are increasingly harmful to men as well as women. At the crux of this argument is the pivotal role played by ideal-worker norms that stipulate complete devotion to science, with other matters, such as having a personal life or being actively engaged in family responsibilities, viewed as distracting from the laser-focus need to build a successful academic career. While the authors did interview some men who heartily embraced ideal-worker norms and the associated long work hours, generally relying upon homemaking wives to do so, this pattern was increasingly rare among younger participants. This central theme connects with other scholarship that has highlighted the desire of many men to be actively engaged fathers (e.g., Kaufman 2013) by bringing to the forefront the barriers erected by workplaces imbued with ideal-worker norms. In calling attention to the ways in which men are negatively impacted by these issues, Ecklund and Lincoln offer a useful argument that can be used to effect change, especially when combined with other scholarship highlighting the harms that accrue to all workers across the board when family responsibilities are frowned upon in the workplace (e.g., Cech and Blair-Loy 2014). Framing work-family polices as beneficial to all workers, without explicitly connecting them to gender, can help change efforts gain traction, as has been suggested by recent scholarship about similar issues in the corporate environment (e.g., Kelly et al. 2010).

A second contribution centers on exploring work-family issues across the academic life-course by including the experiences of graduate students and those in postdoctoral positions alongside those in faculty ranks. The authors highlight the difficulties encountered by women (and men) faculty members managing work and family responsibilities, along with the practical strategies academics have used to build their careers in the face of ideal-worker norms. The findings from graduate students are particularly illuminating, as they make clear that during graduate...