As usual, I was fascinated by the responses to last week’s column. I am still looking for the place where I wrote, as “Anonymous” charges, that I “didn't like and continue not to like the fact that [my] alma mater went mixed.” I actually had no desire to attend a women’s college—that was my parents’ idea. I had a brother and no sisters, and two out of my four closest friends in high school were smart, decent, kindhearted boys. I enjoyed male energy, as I continue to do (fortunately, since I live with two men). But my parents, who were paying all the bills not covered by loans and my minimum-wage jobs, did not believe in higher education for women in the first place, and they were anxious about the “free love” that was sweeping the country (I entered college in 1970). When I refused to attend secretarial school, and a number of my teachers lobbied on my behalf, they caved — but allowed me to apply to only three schools, all traditionally female, all in the South. I got into all three, and they chose the least expensive one.

There were huge advantages to attending a mostly-women’s college, but I didn’t discover these fully until later, and didn’t completely appreciate them until after graduation. (More on this in a later post.) At the time, I was just relieved and grateful to be going to college at all, and as long as the academics were good and the people were friendly, I didn’t much care which one. If anything, I was relieved that there would be some guys around.

It wasn’t the presence of men, in other words, that upset me. It was the double standard that was obviously applied in admissions and in the enforcement of rules. My cousin, a smart, nice person and a good student, was rejected by this school, as were a number of my classmates’ equally qualified female friends and relatives. I would have thus assumed that I’d be surrounded by even smarter, more literate people, and this was true of many of the women I met, and, as I said, of some of the men. But hardly most of them.

I wondered, based on Libby’s speculation, whether there might be some “anecdotal exaggeration” to my recollection of the out-of-control behavior in the men’s dorm. It was a long time ago, and I do tend to unconsciously edit my memories to make a better story. So I checked with my good friend Randy Moomaw, whom I met during our first year there, and who actually lived in the men’s dorm in question. Here is his recollection: “[The dorm] was like a backwoods Animal House in many ways. I actually used to keep my door "hooked" so no one could come bounding in.”

Folks, Randy is no shrinking violet. It really was that bad.

As to why — I have to say, I agree with both JD and EF, even though they think they disagree with each other. I think the education system as a whole does a disservice to boys, and part of that disservice consists of inculcating them with privilege over mere girls. But that’s another post, too.

In the meantime I’m still puzzling out the requirement that the expression of ideas and recollection of experiences be “attractive.” Is this something men have to worry about, too, or is it, like lipstick, expected only of women?

My first week of graduate school found me in a microeconomics class with a teacher reviewing the assumptions behind what is commonly called the “Adam Smith hypothesis”. Referring to the founder of the discipline of economics, it is a hypothesis that free markets work well, and that work so well that under them no one can be made better off without someone else being made worse off. This can actually be proven using calculus, using a proof that makes us math geeks smile, but it is dependent on several assumptions that may or may not be true in all situations. These assumptions include the assumption that people have the necessary information to make good decisions and that people are strictly self-interested. It was this last assumption that struck me, sitting in that graduate class, as wrong, since I had two friends who at that moment were serving in volunteer organizations abroad. I asked the teacher about how he reconciled the assumption of self-interest with the fact that some people go to great lengths to be altruistic, and received an adequate answer.

I was not completely convinced, however, and found myself coming back to the assumption of no altruism over and over in my graduate studies. In the end, I wrote my dissertation on a topic relating to altruism, and have continued to study it ever since. I think that any parent knows well that the assumption of self-interest is not always valid, unless expanded to include an interest in the well-being of our children. No matter how much we want to stay in a warm bed, we pull ourselves out to answer the cries of a sick child. And it is such interest that inspires us to spend money on things like tuition and clothes for our children in ways that are not strictly in our own self-interest.

I have spent the research portion of my academic career studying volunteerism and the nonprofit sector, and along the way have met other people, including some economists, who are studying the same thing. I originally met them through the fellowship that funded my dissertation, and later through a professional organization known as “ARNOVA”, which stands for “Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action.” I love to attend their conferences, which are all the more exciting because they are interdisciplinary, with economists talking to psychologists, talking to sociologists and social workers. However, since taking our daughter home, I have not traveled to attend one, and have therefore communicated with the other scholars from the group only by e-mail.

I owe a great debt to the senior scholars in that group, for several reasons. They have read my work and offered suggestions over the years, suggesting articles to cite and journals to submit to. Many of the senior scholars were on the committee that chose me for a dissertation fellowship twenty years ago, thereby speeding up my entrance into full time employment just fast enough to allow me to obtain a job with health insurance right when I discovered I was deathly ill. They encouraged me to accept a job in Cleveland, with its rich heritage of philanthropy, but did not realize that they were also steering me toward a town that housed some of the world’s best hospitals housing the world’s best neurosurgeons. It is not too much to say that I am alive and well today because of their mentoring years ago.

This year the conference came to me, and is being held in downtown Cleveland, near my home. I am going for the first time in many years, and there are several things that are different this time. I am bringing my co-author, a former colleague who refused to allow me to forget that, while I reside in a math department, I am an economist at heart. In my wallet are new business cards with my title of professor and chair, as well as a beautiful picture of my daughter. And I am counting on the name tags to help people recognize me, because in the years since I saw many of these people, I have gained some wrinkles and dark circles under my eyes. I see these as badges of honor from my efforts to parent my daughter, and I celebrate them. Because, as I look in the mirror at the person I have become, I realize that I am doing something that was almost out of reach only a short time ago; I am getting to grown old.

At this point in the semester, my students – who once seemed an amorphous blob of Kaylas, Kyras, and Karas — have emerged as distinct, complicated, and often intriguing personalities.

As always, the courses I’ve carefully planned on paper fail to take into account the living, breathing people who comprise them. And while I challenge myself to design courses that engage and inspire every type of student, it is of course the students themselves who define the course’s identity.

I’ve often wished that we could meet with our students before the semester begins, before we select our texts and plan the syllabus. That way, we could learn what the students already know, their strengths and weaknesses. But I get to know students in a random, haphazard fashion and I can’t predict which ones will emerge as troubled, brilliant, wise, engaging, or all of the above. Some students seek me out, some respond to a stray comment or email, and others a chance encounter.

As an example, this semester has been immeasurably buoyed by the presence of my teaching assistant, Melissa. An enigmatic, charming, and intellectually vibrant young woman, Melissa’s presence in my large general education courses has tempered the atmosphere, making it more personal and welcoming. Our conversations after class sometimes veer away from pedagogy to personal matters and before I knew it, we’d become friends.

However, getting to know students can be heart-breaking as well. This week an outgoing, vivacious young woman came to my office to explain why she had (uncharacteristically) missed classes. “I’ve been dealing with some grief and apathy,” she stated in her email. I prepared myself for a story of a recent breakup, or the loss of a grandparent, but I what I heard instead was a narration of unimaginable sorrow, calmly told by someone who had clearly come to terms and accepted more in her 19 years than I’ve experienced in 45. I had little to offer her, and she clearly wasn’t asking for anything – not an extension on her work, not advice, not even sympathy. Perhaps she told me her story in order to be real in the classroom, be known.

I realize that a power imbalance exists between teacher and student, and that careful boundaries have to be maintained. Certainly professors do not need the extra burden of being students’ counselors — nor are we qualified to do so. However, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that students don’t respond to us as people, or that teaching exists outside of the personal, the human.

A couple of posts in the last week about gender balance have caught my eye. Both came from Susan O'Doherty, whose Career Coach pieces have spurred all kinds of interesting comments on the blog as well as new ideas for me. First was her brief piece calling our attention to Scott Jaschik's longer piece on a possible challenge to Title IX arising out of a perceived problem with gender imbalance in liberal arts colleges, which she followed up with a longer piece on the transformation at her previously all-women's college when men were admitted.

I've seen comments similar to Susan's second piece elsewhere: that when men start attending a previously all-women's college (or simply move into residence halls previously reserved for women, as has happened where I teach) that the differences are striking, with more need for maintenance, higher levels of vandalism, etc. when the men move in. I'm not going to comment on whether these reports are true or not — I suspect there's some truth to them, and some anecdotal exaggeration. But they reminded me of an argument that I heard when my own institution was considering moving from single-sex housing to co-ed housing. Some favored it, believing that bringing men into the women's residence halls (and vice versa) would cut down on the level of vandalism in the men's halls; others, who preferred the system as it was, complained that they were tired of hearing about how women would "civilize" men — tired, that is, of having it be women's "job" to do so. It was an interesting shift from what I'd seen when I moved into a co-ed residence hall many years earlier: my mother, seeing that my door was adjacent to a stairwell that led down to a city street, was pleased that there were some freshman football players living down the hall, surmising that they'd be "protection" against — whatever dangers she thought might come up the stairwell. In the event, no dangers came up the stairwell, nor did the guys break any more furniture (as far as I know) than anyone else living in the dorm.

One hopes, of course, that men and women help civilize each other — we share a world, after all, and we might perhaps learn to do so by sharing living quarters. My husband tries desperately (and sometimes futilely, I fear) to "civilize" me — I am by far the messier one of the two of us, and my mess sometimes threatens to take over the house. Now, I'm not wrecking the antiques or carving my initials into the furniture, like the men in Susan's second story, but you take my point.

Still, though my husband and I may bend the expected gender roles here, there's a kernel of something (I'm just not quite sure it's truth!) in this story of women civilizing men. I'm about to teach Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (just mentioned in Dana Campbell's recent piece on her mother-daughter book club) in my children's lit class. It's the third or fourth novel we've discussed that has at its core a friendship between a boy and a girl.* This is, I think, a popular central trope in children's fiction — it may prevent a book from being typed as either a "boy book" or a "girl book," and it offers a way of talking about relationships that's somewhere between romance and "buddy story." But it's also the case that in all the books with this relationship at its core that I've taught, the girl "civilizes" or teaches the boy — the friendship, in other words, is not really equal. In Bridge to Terabithia, there's a certain reciprocity: Jess gives Leslie a sense of belonging in a new place, but Leslie introduces Jess to a world outside his small town — an introduction that seems, in the end, the far greater gift. We've traced similar movements in other novels we've discussed, and we keep coming back to the question of gender: could we reverse the roles? What would the book look like if we did?

Children's literature is not the world, of course, and there are certainly other models for male-female relationships besides those offered in the books I'm teaching. But at the moment I'm simply struck by the similarity. Would we find books in which a young boy "civilizes" or teaches a young girl impossibly patronizing? Or just impossible? Have I gravitated towards these books because they express something that I've seen in the world, that perhaps I unconsciously think is true, or is the connection a coincidence?

As always, I have more questions than answers. But I think we need to keep raising the questions anyway, to keep asking what we are striving for when we look for gender balance, what aims we hope to achieve with that balance. Until we know where we want to go, we probably won't figure out how to get there.

* Others include Skellig, by David Almond; Feed, by M.T. Anderson; and The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The latter has a three-way friendship with two boys and a girl, and only one boy really requires "civilizing." We could also include Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White, on this list, if we take Charlotte's relationship with Wilbur to be a friendship, which some of us do.

The undergraduate institution I attended went co-ed the year I matriculated. It had previously been an all-women’s college, the sister school to a nearby men’s university that began admitting women the same year.

By the time I graduated, there were about thirty men among a student body of 2500. Some of these guys were stellar — bright, committed, enlightened, and fun to be around. Most were not. A number were unprepared for the academic and social challenges of college; a few bragged that they had transferred because “with all these chicks around it should be a piece of cake to get laid.” It was clear to us that there was a double admissions standard. We joked that the entrance exam for men consisted of the ability to sign one’s name, but we didn’t find it funny, really.

There was one men’s dormitory. It was a beautiful old house — one of several on campus; most were reserved for honors students or those with special interests. I lived in one that was dedicated to French-speaking students. It was a privilege to live there, among well cared for antique furnishings, and we were constantly reminded that the privilege could be revoked for bad grades or bad behavior. The men, however, lived under no such strictures. After two years the furniture in their parlor had to be completely replaced, with sturdy vinyl-covered couches and chairs and utilitarian lamps, because the antiques had been wrecked, some in drunken parties and others through everyday abuse such as cigarette burns and carved initials. When they partied we could hear them clear across campus. And it was sometimes hard to maintain an atmosphere of respect in the classroom with some guy blathering on about a topic he clearly knew next to nothing about.

Again, this wasn’t everyone. Idiocy wasn’t a requirement for admission if you were a male — it just wasn’t a dealbreaker. The “good” men were embarrassed by the others, and worked to dissociate from them. But the others dominated.

And the question arose, again and again, Why are they doing this to us? When our “brother” college agreed, grudgingly from what we understood, to begin admitting women, they didn’t lower their admission standards. The women there kept up with their classes at least as well as the men did, despite stories of harassment and shunning. But the quality of our classroom discussions was degraded, and our college’s academic reputation was somewhat tarnished.

Several years after I graduated, my alma mater moved to change its name from a woman’s name to two last names (officially gender neutral, but the names were famous enough so that their (white) male connotations were clear) “to reflect the changing demographics of the student body,” meaning that men weren’t applying in sufficient numbers because of the girl’s name. Alumnae back to the aughts exploded. Why is it acceptable for women to attend schools named after men, we demanded, but not vice versa? Why do they always have to be catered to?

My school backed down — and began focusing for the first time on competitive, rather than recreational, athletics. The number of men on campus increased. The school itself is now much larger than it was in my day (“bloated,” according to one of my old professors). Academics are okay, from what I understand, though the presence of “student-athletes” on campus has shifted interest away from the arts and humanities, the college’s original strength.

And I’m still asking the question: Why? I appreciate Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur’s explanation (in the comments section of last week’s column) that admissions departments believe that “once an elite college tips too far towards a female majority, the best female applicants will no longer consider the school because they feel there will be too much competition for dates.”

But is this really the case? Are women, even today, willing to compromise their education for dates—and are fellow students the only fish in the pool? Men in all-male schools (think the Citadel) seem to want to keep it that way, no matter how qualified female applicants are. Do they worry about getting dates?

What is going on here?

Several weeks ago, I asked my readers to share their maternity leave stories with me, as I work to propose a reasonable maternity leave for Ursuline college. This week I want to summarize what I learned, thanks to my readers who were generous with their time in responding to my request. I am especially excited about the responses I received, because I think that they move us in the direction of seeing these “blogs” as on-line discussions, with the weekly entries being the start of the discussion, but, by all means, not the end of them.

I want to start out by saying that our efforts here at Ursuline are a good start, and not as in need of improvement as those at some colleges. I just think they could be even better, which is why I am in search of additional ideas. We do allow mothers giving birth to use short term disability leave during the time they have their child, and anyone, including new dads and adoptive parents, are eligible for five weeks of paid personal leave. Since five weeks away from campus was pretty useless for me as a college teacher, when we adopted our daughter I translated it into course reductions and moved some of my classes to the evenings and to summer, thus giving me what amounted to a good “maternity leave.” However, not every school is so generous, and even we could do better. I have therefore given myself the task of summarizing potential maternity leave options for us and for anyone else who is interested in the issue.

Responses to my request were interesting. Some included personal stories of the benefits their institutions offered them, while others directed me to web sites that provided additional information. One responder took an approach similar to the one I took, and overloaded one semester so she could have a reduced load when she needed it. She managed to teach only one day a week while on “leave”.

Another was given a leave that began when she had her baby in January, allowing her to take a full six months to be home after the birth. A similar approach is taken at Ursuline when a faculty member uses the disability leave to fashion a maternity leave.

Still other respondants directed me to web sites with more information. One directed me to the web site of the University of California system, which spells out leave policies for childbearing as well as for parental leave without pay. Of particular interest was the clause that allows Family and Medical Leave to be taken as part of a “reduced work schedule or on an intermittent basis.” Indeed, such an approach might partially eliminate the problem of how benefits would be maintained while taking FML.

Another responder directed me to the National Clearinghouse on Academic Work Life, which I had not visited previously. I was amazed at the wealth of information there that might be of interest to anyone who regularly reads Mama, Ph.D. At their web site I was able to find examples of maternity leave policies at different colleges and universities, including colleges that allow the use of Family and Medical Leave to fashion a reduced load. Also mentioned was the use of sick time, which might be one’s own sick time or that donated by colleagues, that could be used to create a leave, as well as several interesting academic papers that relate to Family and Medical Leave. One paper suggested that women are using the Family and Medical Leave to maintain continuity in their jobs after having children, but may be trading off job continuity for somewhat lower wages in the long run.

I noted one suggestion that has larger implications; one respondent said that their college offered a one semester leave for the “primary parent” and a one course release for the “secondary parent.” In reading that, I am reminded of a comment from my column last week, which asks why I assumed that the mother is the one acting with primary child care duties. I am not making this assumption myself, but am reacting to the common practice of schools and doctor’s offices in the area where I live. In this part of the country, where many mothers focus on at-home child rearing, it is almost always the mother who is called about health and child welfare issues when they arise, although I realize that this does not need to be the case. Indeed, I wonder, just how is the status of “primary parent” determined when such an arrangement is used? I suspect that it does not need to be correlated with gender in the same way that “disability leave” used as maternity leave must be.

On an unrelated topic, I wanted to pass along a funny story a colleague told me. A girl came trick-or-treating at her house dressed all in pink with a pig mask and two little wings taped to her back. She was, of course, dressed as the “swine flu.” I hope everyone is staying healthy!

Last week my daughter and I read the classic Bridge to Terabithia. I wouldn’t have re-read this on my own (too sad, for one thing!), but a little group of my fifth grade daughter’s friends organized the SS-MD-BC: Second-Sunday-of-the-month Mother-Daughter Book-Club, and we had our first meeting last weekend. I’m excited that in the upcoming months my reading habits will expand to include a new literature especially since in recent years my daughter has not had the patience for me reading to her in the evenings as we used to when she was younger, much preferring to read on her own.

I’m also excited to be part of this group. In our first meeting last Sunday – just an hour and a half which included 15 minutes of decorating the covers of their new “reading notebooks”, 20 minutes of technical discussion about running the group, and another 20 minutes of play and snack afterwards), we had a wonderful and connecting discussion. Magically, there was a great comfort and joy in talking about the book together – and crying together (a roll of toilet paper made many circuits!) There was a range of emotional outlay, among the mothers and daughters both – a couple of the girls were tearful for much of the discussion, even breaking into heaving sobs at times. Others were more stoic. Everyone was clearly touched by their friends' feelings, if not obviously by the book itself. Most of the moms laughed at ourselves as we wiped away our own tears more subtly.

My own daughter was one of the more reserved there. She passed on the toilet paper on each round, and she declined invitations to comment on the story, except with the most factual contributions. Yet, because of the “shelving crisis” which made our public library unable to find Bridge to Terabithia in our time frame except for as a book on tape, I have insight into my daughter’s engagement with the story. In fact, my daughter and I did not actually read Bridge to Terabithia together last week, we listened together, snuggled up cozily in the same room, where I watched her body tense at the difficult bits, her face shine with admiration for the characters at some points, and cloud with fear and sadness in others. Like my daughter I have always been an avid reader, and like her I also was reserved during group discussions all through high school (who am I kidding – all through college and grad school too, and even now I still refine and re-refine my thoughts in my head before blurting them out, often with that panicky feeling). I know there are thoughts and ideas burbling inside her, but it can be a hard process to express those internalizations. As an adult, watching these kids learning how to interpret their feelings and understandings of literature I realize more than ever how productive and crucial to scholarship is the act of participating in group discussions, whether it be at a lab meeting, or a question and answer session after a talk, or discussion of a particular work or paper, or a class discussion, or just with a friend over lunch; and how important it is to practice this process, which can be painful instead of fun.

Next month we will host SS-MD-BC at our house, and my daughter gets to pick the book. She has chosen one that is far less sad, and I’m curious to see whether this will bring a different range of interactions to the group. I have the feeling that as we progress with this safe, encouraging group we’ll all get better and better at exploring books with different themes, and at taking the risks that go along with practicing together. It’s great to have this chance to practice these risks in a milieu that will maximize positive return, especially for girls: feeling that heady rush in putting together a concept, or satisfaction of delving into an agreement with someone, or convincing someone of your idea is a powerful start in building a confident scholar.

How did it get to be November already? It was 70F here today, so it doesn't really feel like November, but my calendar's pretty clear that not only is it November, it has been for over a week now. Which means, of course, that Thanksgiving is almost here, and the end of the semester is close on its heels.

Of course if it's November it's also crunch time for job applicants and search committees. I'm on a search committee myself this year, and have not yet started to read the over 140 applications that have already come in (I am starting tomorrow, I promise!). Somehow it just seems wrong that Louis Menand's piece in Harvard Magazine came out just as most job application deadlines were hitting. I think we all knew that the job market in academe was bad and had been for some time, but had we all internalized these numbers? "Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s." Or how about these? "People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood."

t's hard to imagine that any of these numbers have gotten any better in the intervening years; so, as my chosen career has become more and more professionalized — harder to enter — it has also become less valued. And, as Menand also notes, "there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get." Many of those who don't get jobs will be women who sacrifice their careers when their partners find well-paying work, or when they choose to focus on family rather than face the job market one more time, or when they take adjunct positions that offer flexibility but no future. What are the costs to the profession — and to society — of closing the door on these qualified teachers and scholars?

I'm one of the lucky ones. I've got tenure in a place I love, where I can raise my children and pursue my passion. But what of those who don't? As I read application files this fall, I can't help but recognize that these pages represent years of work on the part of their authors, work that may not be rewarded with a tenure-track job, however worthy and hard-working their authors may be. My colleagues and I on the search committee joke that we hope most of our applicants are really obviously unqualified—that their letters refer to unspecified anger management problems, or that they have degrees in, say, microbiology rather than literature: that would make it easier, we know, to make the hard calls. But the reality is, qualified applicants will not make the cut, and we may even be the worse for it. We'll do our best—and, if recent history is any guide, we'll gain a terrific new colleague at the end of the process. But I hope that as we go through the process we'll continue to think about how we train our future colleagues, and how we prepare them for a future that may not include an academic job.

Scott has a fascinating article in this week’s Inside Higher Ed News, about a proposed inquiry by the US Commission on Civil Rights into the admissions policies of private liberal arts colleges. The concern is that, in an effort to correct gender imbalances, these colleges favor applications by men.

Such an inquiry sounds reasonable, but the proposed solution seems insane:

Much of the probe is directed toward the issue of athletics, with commissioners favoring the inquiry saying that it would be "preferable" for liberal arts colleges to add male athletic teams to attract more male students than it is to use admissions preferences, as is alleged to be taking place now.

Leaving aside the apparent intention to betray at least the spirit of Title IX, I have to ask: What is the problem with gender imbalances? This is a serious question. Do girls still have cooties? Is estrogen so toxic that too much of it would disable the faculty? Is there a sense that women still attend college for that M.R.S. degree, and so would be reluctant to enter an environment in which women outnumber men? Given that males are not a historically oppressed group, and therefore are not, presumably, in need of a leg up, why wouldn’t schools want the most qualified and committed candidates regardless of gender?

Thoughts?

Last week was a difficult one in my family, as all of us got hit with a bug that is going around. I suspect that my daughter brought it home from school, and she was the first to be hit, followed closely by me. My husband eventually got it, but only on the weekend, when it conveniently would not conflict with any “billable hours” in his practice. I managed to re-arrange my teaching so I could grab a few hours of rest, and was doubly lucky because I multitasked by taking care of my daughter at the same time. I managed to have her asleep upstairs with me downstairs with a box of tissues, typing away at the computer, writing last week’s column between sneezes. But, as I said, I was very lucky, since I could re-arrange my schedule easily to get a few hours of needed rest. Not everyone can do that, and, certainly, not every mother employed outside the home, inside or outside of academia, can count on being sick at the same time their child is sick. The whole experience reminds me of an article by Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe from last February.

In that article, Ellen Goodman said that the economy is close to reaching the point where there are actually an equal number of female employees as male ones. This is the parity that we have worked years for, but it doesn’t feel so good, after all, since it came at the expense of males as they were laid off in the recession. Some sectors, which include academia, have been hit relatively less hard, and, since they tend to employ more women, have tilted the ratio towards women employees.

With more women employees, we can only assume that it will be those sectors that will be hit hardest as the current flu season descends on us and sets off our cell phones ringing to tell us to please pick up our sick children. And how will academia handle this? Can we rely on the fact that most of these women will be sick the same days as their children? Most likely, we cannot, and so this sector with more than the average number women in it will be hit even harder than others by the progressing flu season.

As well as the “sick time” worked out last week, in that column I typed between sneezes and coughs, I once again made a very public math mistake. This time, it was probably one that very few people caught, although I was taken to task by one professor in the comments to my entry. I made mistakes in explaining how adjustments for leap years are made in computing changes in days of the week that dates fall upon. Of course, it is the leap years that are divisible by 100 that are skipped, unless they are also divisible by 400, in which case they are kept. This all helps to make sure the calendar year comes very close to the actual number of days the Earth revolves around the sun each year. I wanted to make corrections clear, and to admit my mistake. As my students would say, “my bad.”

Just as I was beating myself up for the mistake, in a way that only a woman in a male dominated field can do, I realized that the actual story was not in the mistake, but in the circumstances that led me to make the mistake in the first place, since I was sick as I wrote it. This all brings us back to the question of what to do when your child gets sick. If my daughter’s school calls me, I need to hope that it is in the part of a day that I have blocked off for research, and that I have work that is transportable that can come home with me when I pick her up. If not, I am in a difficult situation. However, I must admit that this is still a better situation than most women employed outside of the home face when they get that call from their child’s school.

By the way, THANK YOU to everyone who sent in suggestions about maternity leave policies. I will summarize them soon.