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4. Work-Life Integration
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
* Work-Life Integration * Cathy Ann Trower Work-Life Integration Challenges In any conversation with faculty, it does not take long before the issue of work-life balance, or lack thereof, arises. Many pre-tenure faculty members find themselves wrestling with the constraints imposed by the traditional tenure-track model. Academic careers are increasingly considered a mismatch for men and women facing family demands, especially those unaddressed by existing university policies. While the focus of this book is not on gender, the issue cannot be avoided in this chapter—when it comes to integrating work and home life and trying to find a sense of balance, female faculty face greater barriers than male faculty.^^1 The Balancing Act Gender Gap Because the tenure track was originally designed to accommodate a male trajectory (Grant et al. 2000), females, whose pre-tenure experience typically coincides with their prime childbearing years, face much greater odds (Armenti 2004a). In their study of over 800 postdoctoral fellows at UC Berkeley, Mason and Goulden (2002) found that 59 percent of married women with children were considering leaving academia. Married women with children were far more likely than others to cite children as one of the reasons they changed their career goals away from academia, and they were the most likely to indicate that balancing career and family was a source of high stress for them. Such women worked significantly fewer hours per week in the laboratory (averaging a little over forty hours per week in comparison to more than fifty hours a week for the other groups) and presented research findings at far fewer national conferences (45 percent of married womenPage 64 with children did not present findings at national conferences in the last year in comparison to only 24 percent of other groups). With these performance indicators you can imagine that their mentors, professors, and others would be less likely to recommend them for research university positions. (Mason and Goulden 2002, pp. 25–26) According to Sorcinelli and Billings (1993), pre-tenure female academics experience far greater difficulty than males in balancing work with family commitments. Women reported significant work overload, dedicating more time to domestic tasks and child care and less to academic research and teaching (Mason and Goulden 2004b). It is likely for this reason that many abandon their tenure pursuits in favor of job opportunities that allow for improved work flexibility (Mason et al. 2009b). For those females who do stay the course and obtain tenure, personal sacrifices must be made. Women who achieved tenure were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be single twelve years after earning the Ph.D. (37 percent versus 15 percent) and were more likely to be single and childless than were male academics (26 percent versus 11 percent) (Mason and Goulden 2004a). While the majority of male academics were married with children, nearly half of their female counterparts remained childless, regardless of marital status, 51 versus 63 percent (Perna 2001). Yet this is in direct conflict with the desire of most Americans to marry and have children (Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001). The Pipeline According to the National Science Foundation (2009), in 2008 the number of doctorates awarded to men rose by 95 (to 26,271) over the previous year, while those awarded to women rose by 612 (to 22,496). Women’s share of all doctorates earned in 2008 was 46 percent, similar to that in 2007; 2008 was the thirteenth consecutive year in which the representation of female doctorate recipients has surpassed 40 percent. The percentage of all doctorate recipients who are women has increased from 27 percent in 1978, to 42 percent in 1998, to 45 percent in 2003. In addition, the proportion of doctorates earned by women has grown consistently within all broad fields of study. In 2008, women constituted 67 percent of all education doctorates and the majority in social sciences (58 percent), life sciences (53 percent), and humanities (52 percent). The representationPage 65 of women among doctorate recipients in physical sciences and engineering was 28 percent and 22 percent respectively, up from 10 percent and 2 percent in 1978. Women earned 41 percent of the science and engineering doctorates and 58 percent in non–science and engineering fields. While not all who earn doctorates intend to pursue academic careers, many do. Yet, as revealed in chapter 1, women represent a lower percentage of the tenure track (44 percent) and tenured faculty (30 percent). The deficit of women...