gender & work

How Babies Alter Careers for Academics


Having children often bumps women off the tenure track, a new study shows
http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i15/15a00101.htm
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As I finish graduate school, I begin to feel like I can see a light at the end of a tunnel...but then I stop and think, what really lies ahead? Last week I attended a Faculty-Student dinner. My half of the table got into a heated debate concerning children and whether or not we felt we even had the choice to have them.

Since I was eight, I knew that I wanted to get a PhD as soon as I could in as little time possible. My mother returned to graduate school after having three children, when I was around four or five. While most of the other mothers in the neighborhood found outlets in their churches, book clubs, and aerobics classes-- my mom was lugging around huge sociology textbooks and going overseas to do fieldwork. At our house everyone knew all about comprehensive exams, statistics classes, random sampling.

My mother invested so much time and love into our upbringing, sometimes it is almost unbearable to consider. I'm now the same age she was when she had me. I wonder what I really want and what I'm really working towards.

This part of the recent online chat session sponsored by the chronicle of higher education makes me pause:

"When I returned to work, I found that almost half of my salary went to child care and that when all my expences were accounted for, about $5,000 per year was all I netted. My husband has joked that he is subsidizing my academic pursuits because, on a financial level, the only real gain I have received is a pension plan and not much more.--Xenia Morin"

Some say we all need wives, domestic help, but is that really the answer? To sustain a second-class of women, who most likely have their own children back in Jamaica or the Philippines? A friend suggested to me several weeks ago that perhaps one ought to have live in nannies and allow them to raise their children alongside one's own. I asked her how committed she is to communal living and pointed out some of what I thought were the more obvious flaws with her schemes. I told her how in South Africa, the latest trend is for wealthy [white] families to sponsor/foster the children of their domestic servants, sometimes having them live in the main house and attend school with their children. I could see we were coming to the question from different angles and didn't pursue the topic. The more I think about it however, the more I may need to.