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83 Securing a tenure-track position represents one of the most profound moments of an academic’s career. After long years as a student, one suddenly becomes a titled professional. Next looms the challenge of a lifetime: getting tenure. On completion of a demanding probationary period, the academic gets a brass ring: one of the world’s most secure jobs. The perquisites of the position are renowned, just as the blood, toil, tears, and sweat it often takes to get there are notorious. Subsequent to tenure comes a measure of security, yet still more hurdles. Scholars aspiring to the rank of full professor must continue to burnish their professional credentials. And at most schools, meaningful pay raises are contingent on continued scholarly productivity. This chapter examines gender differences in academic careers after the pressure cooker pre-tenure years. In particular, we are interested in how marriage and children affect men’s and women’s salaries and promotion to full professor . We have already demonstrated wide-ranging gender differences in how young Ph.D. recipients enter the professoriate and obtain tenure. Do these differences extend into the midcareer years? How do marriage and children affect promotion to full professor and faculty salaries? We also explore retirement and the role of family considerations at the end of academic careers. These topics are of special interest, given the paucity of previous research. Most higher education scholars have focused on the early career years (studies of the income gender gap are an exception).1 To an extent this is understandable because the most conspicuous gender difference in the professoriate is simply the glaring absence of women. But as the previous chapter has shown, simply achieving gender parity isn’t enough. We need also be concerned with how women fare once they receive tenure and become ensconced in their academic careers. 5 Life after Tenure 84 DO BABIES MATTER? Promotion to Full Professor We would expect family considerations to matter less when men and women seek promotion to the rank of full professor. The vast majority of academicians will be in their forties or older when that promotion becomes a possibility. According to the 2006 Survey of Doctorate Recipients, only 2 percent of academics become full professors within ten years of receiving their doctorates.2 This means that promotion to full professor becomes an issue for most women when they are beyond their childbearing years. Many academics will have children in the house around the time they seek promotion, but these children are likely to be older and in school and not requiring the same degree of care that babies and toddlers do. By now, most of the academics who will ever get married have probably already done so.3 Dual-career concerns have likely faded, since scholars seeking promotion to full professor will have been at their jobs for a number of years; presumably their partners are equally ensconced in their careers and not looking to relocate. Although family considerations can still affect women’s ability to get ahead, there should be fewer challenges at this juncture than for women seeking academic jobs or working towards tenure. This was the belief of one woman faculty member in the social sciences at the University of California : “Family obligations have slowed down my research and overall career, but they haven’t ended it—I still got tenure, am still a productive researcher. And I expect that the impact of parenthood will diminish somewhat as my kids become older and more independent (my younger child is 2). I think this is a great outcome—it would be unrealistic for kids not to slow down a career, especially a mother’s career. Yes, I’ve won fewer awards, have a somewhat lower pro- file, have had fewer outside offers than I would have without kids. But I haven’t been forced to make the hard choice between only a career and only family.” Only 19 percent of full professors in the sciences, and just 24 percent overall , are women.4 The Survey of Doctorate Recipients sheds light on this disparity. Adjusting for various differences between respondents, we find that female associate professors in all fields are 21 percent less likely to get promoted in comparison with their male colleagues. Marriage and children, young or old, do not affect the chances of promotion differently for men and women.5 In fact, we find marriage increases the likelihood of promotion to full professor by 23 percent for both sexes. The...

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