Parenting and Professing

For those outside academia who face the conflicting demands of work and family, the typical professor's job might seem like a dream occupation - flexible schedule, the ability to do some work from home, summers off. But as this book reveals, that popular image is anything but accurate, especially where women are concerned. Indeed, with their demands for total commitment from professors, colleges and universities offer a generally inhospitable workplace for dedicated parents. As recent research has shown, having babies before gaining tenure can have a considerable negative impact on women's academic careers, and this problem is clearly a key factor in women's inability to achieve gender parity in academia. The twenty-four essays in this collection - almost all of them recounting personal experiences - offer a complex view of both the difficulties and rewards of combining parenting with academic work and provide valuable ideas for how individuals and institutions can create change. Following an introductory overview of recent research on work-family issues specific to higher education, the book is divided into three parts. In ""Challenges,"" the essayists confront situations that complicate individuals' efforts to succeed at both parenting and professorial work, such as the difficulties of finding faculty positions, unusual family configurations, and biases against mothers. The essays in ""Possibilities"" recount the positives - for research and teaching, for families and the professors themselves - of finding ways to honor both family and professional commitments. ""Change,"" the third section, explores ideas for making it easier to combine parenting with an academic career - changes at the individual, interpersonal, policy, and system levels.