Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family

Chapter 9. Leaving the Tenure Track

165 What about people who did not get tenure? What about those who left the tenure track? Did people leave academia all together? Although it is hard to identify the specific number of women who did not get tenure, or who are no longer on the tenure track due to attrition between the early- and mid-career phases of the study, we are able to comment on the experiences of those faculty that we interviewed in the mid-career phase of the study who were no longer on the tenure track, either voluntarily or involuntarily. It is on these women and their experiences that we now focus. We do so by first looking at some existing research and perspectives about women leaving the workforce and then moving on to the stories of the women in our study who left their initial tenure-track positions. “Opting out” is a term used “to describe the decision of married women to voluntarily quit professional careers and remain out of the labor force for a relatively extended period of time (beyond the duration of parental leave) during which they are engaged in family caregiving, primarily motherhood, to the exclusion of paid employment” (Stone et al. 2010, 1). These women “opt out” and “head home,” in the words of Lisa Belkin, who coined the term in a 2003 New York Times Magazine article. In the case of academic women, as we found in our research, the choice to opt out generally does not take women entirely out of the workforce, but may be underlying decisions to work part time, or to work in nontenure-track positions, or to work in less prestigious institutions. While some may frame decisions about how and in what context to pursue an academic career and to subsequently opt out of chapter 9 O Leaving the Tenure Track 166 academic motherhood it as a matter of personal agency, the decisions can also be viewed as being problematic because they signify that the tenure track is not an acceptable domain for women with children (Stone 2007). One reason women leave the work force is the perceived incompatibility of work as a professor and life as a mother. Opting out is important to our work, as well as the work of other family researchers, because it highlights people leaving the workforce who have made significant investments in their education and professional status. Typically those with professional careers, the focus of the “opt-out revolution” (Belkin 2003), are those with educational backgrounds that merit professional status (such as engineers, professors, economists). Such movement out of the workforce or out of the mainstream workplace by this group of people can leave one to question: Why leave the workforce when so much is invested? Leaving the workforce to take care of children reinforces traditional gender norms and perpetuates separate-sphere thinking that puts women at home and men at work. Further, if these women leave the workforce, given their background and access to resources, what implications does this have for women who do not have access to such resources (Stone 2007)? In our study, opting out took different forms. The first group we analyze include women who involuntarily opted out of the tenure track as a result of not getting tenure. The second group opted out of the tenure track to be full-time parents. The third group opted out of the tenure track to move into a different type of academic position, most often a nontenure-track position. We discuss each one of these situations separately. Involuntary Opting Out “What’s the worst thing that can happen? Not get tenure?” We heard variations on this refrain in several of the early-career interviews. We found that the looming question of tenure (and not getting it) was something that most had grappled with as early-career faculty members. Although most women in the study never had to face their “worst case scenario,” there were some who did, and we want to honor their experiences in this chapter. We also note that we did not craft a vignette for this experience, as it was not a typical experience and the specifics of how and why it happened varied greatly from person to person. leaving the tenure track 167 There were four women in the mid-career phase of our study who were denied tenure sometime before we interviewed them the second time...