Mama PhD

Career Coach: Still More on Gender Balance

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:38:04 GMT

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?

Math Geek Mom: Altruism and Aging

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:10:27 GMT

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.

Motherhood After Tenure: taking students personally

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:58:09 GMT

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.

Mothering at Mid-Career: Gender balance, again—this time in books

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:17:30 GMT

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.

Career Coach: More on Gender Balance

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:38:48 GMT

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?

Math Geek Mom: More on Maternity Leaves

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:50:42 GMT

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!

ABC’s and PhD’s: Book club

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:34:30 GMT

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.

Mothering at Mid-Career: November

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:36:57 GMT

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.

Career Coach: Gender Balance

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:17:52 GMT

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?

Math Geek Mom: Time

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:39:37 GMT

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.

Long Distance Mom: Teen Zombies

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:44:49 GMT

Maybe it’s because it was just Halloween, but, for some reason, zombies seem to have surrounded me recently.

My fourteen year-old daughter Katie wanted to go see Zombieland weekend before last. I voted for Amelia, thinking that would provide her with a more positive role model — “She just got into a plane and decided to fly it!” But a need for good humor, Katie’s desire for sleep, and her brother’s educational crisis won out over both choices.

As I was deplaning from my Chicago flight, I received a phone call from one of my son’s teachers. Much to our surprise, my ex-husband and I discovered that our sixteen year-old son, Nick, was in danger of not passing one of his Honors courses. The teacher encouraged us to drop him back to a non-Honors section, for fear that a failure would remain on his permanent record. This teacher also got us access to an online grading system that many public high schools use—Edline. Edline allows parents and students to monitor tests, homework assignments, and review materials throughout the grading period. On Edline we discovered that Nick was not doing well in several other classes, had neglected to complete about half of all of his homework assignments, but had earned an "A" in Movie Analysis—a fact for which I commended him. (My Phd is in Cinema Studies).

Some angst and family discussions ensued as we tried to decipher what it meant that our son’s grades fluctuated between A’s (test scores) and F’s (no homework completed). We thought that Nick had been doing his homework, and he claims that he thought he was completing it as well, but he admitted to not writing anything down in his planner and spending too much time on Facebook at home.

Was our son just another teenage zombie loaded with hormones? Or was something else going on?

Besides Facebook overuse, Nick admitted to having some concentration issues in his classes, which seem to go beyond simple hormonal exhaustion. I understand concentration issues more intimately now after my own traumatic brain injury (TBI) a few years ago, but Nick’s revelation means that his Dad and I are now working with him to improve his focus, find a learning behavior specialist, and develop better time management skills. We are also banning Facebook indefinitely (but not the heavy metal band Nick plays in), and avoiding the pharmaceutical industry for as long as we can. We recognize that Ritalin may have certain curative effects, but Nick, his Dad and I are trying other strategies first. We worry about the possibility of labeling Nick with a learning disability, since we understand that disabilities cover a wide spectrum of issues and no one diagnosis covers everything.

Crises like this make me really miss not working in the same city as my kids. At least crises bring our family together emotionally, if not geographically…

My daughter seems to have mastered the art of writing her assignments down and turning them in on time, and is waging a (largely) successful battle with her own hormonal spurts. Katie mastered flying a single engine plane with her grandfather at age thirteen. I thought that seeing Amelia would be a natural for her, but, unfortunately, Amelia Earhart seems to fall into that category of ‘that’s good for me’, instead of ‘that’s fun!’ Zombies, werewolves and vampires are, by far, the preferred character studies for teens.

And also for college students, it seems. I took great pleasure in reading about the ‘invasion’ of the University of Florida by student zombies after an employee with a sense of humor posted a “zombie response” on the university’s disaster preparedness site. A student theatre group took the message seriously, donned zombie makeup and costumes, and really simulated the disaster. The university site recommends that one should not describe zombies as “undead” since "'undead’ clearly connotes deficiency; specifically the absence of both life and death. Hence, we suggest here the term ‘life impaired' to recognize the difficulties imposed on a former person by zombie behavior spectrum disorder (ZBSD) but without suggesting the former person is somehow 'deficient' as a result of the infection."

With my own TBI, I have been forced to acknowledge some mental limitations that I now have — spatial directions and concentration are at the top of my list — and I deal with them every day. In just this past week, Nick has managed to buckle down, study hard and pull his grades up. (And he OK’d this column before publication.) He even wants to stay in his Honors courses. We will keep working hard with Nick to develop better learning and concentration strategies that he can take with him to college and beyond.

Particularly since Nick may be interested in attending a Florida university, we don’t want to send our son to college feeling like the stars of our favorite Halloween film did. As one character mournfully suggested: “We’re all orphans in Zombieland.”

ABCs and PhDs: Food and bodies

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:38:45 GMT

One recent morning while I was getting dressed, my four-year-old daughter had some advice for me: “Mama, I want you to eat and eat. I want you to always eat lots of healthy food because then you won’t get skinny”. Where was this conversation going? Was this about body image? I have a good appetite most of the time, I’m not particularly thin, and my weight hasn’t changed much recently, so I didn’t think I’d given her any cause for concern. (Of course I immediately thought her comment had to do with something about my body—talk about body image issues!). Further probing revealed the source of her concerns: “I don’t want you to get skinny and stop eating because then you’ll die, just like Bobby did.” Bobby was one of our elderly cats (our first babies) who, in the past two years, we watched succumb to kidney disease within months of each other. Their appetites diminished, they grew thinner and thinner, and then they stopped eating and drinking altogether. Interestingly my daughter has now come to associate thinness with death. I think that my daughter’s reminder to me to eat was just her way of dealing with normal childhood fears about the death of a parent.

I was relieved that my daughter’s comment reflected an early understanding that healthy eating is important for life, and that not eating is unhealthy. Although I know that my son is not immune to body image issues, I’ve been particularly conscious about having my daughter overhear any discussions about dieting or the need to lose weight. I don’t want her to develop the fears of food that I witnessed in my teenage and college years. My girlhood was no different from that of many women. I was bombarded with discussions about dieting in the media, among friends, and in my own family. How often would I hear at family gatherings: You look great! You’ve lost so much weight! And then there were the whispers: She’s really put on the pounds! After my freshman year of college my grandmother looked at me with a frown and said, “You’re looking very hippy.” I don’t think she was referring to my Hindu print wrap-around skirt, long hair, and sandals.

In college, eating disorders were pervasive, and there was no end to the obsession with weight loss and calorie counting. Someone read that ice cream cones (just the cone) were low in calories, so sugar cones become the snack of choice among women in my dorm. We’d raid the ice cream bar in the dining hall after dinner, and walk out with stacks of cones to get us through a night of studying. Then someone pointed out that the calorie count listed in the book was for wafer cones, not the sugar cones we’d been consuming by the dozen. There was panic over the number of extra calories that had been unwittingly consumed. At this point I rebelled. I simply enjoyed food too much and preferred chocolate to Styrofoam-flavored cones, pork chops to iceberg lettuce salads. Instead of calorie-count books, I read about nutrition and escaped the conversations about dieting and number of calories burned from exercising to the Jane Fonda work-out tape.

I can’t say I’ve completely accepted my own body, and the desire to easily shed a few pounds is always there. But I keep these thoughts to myself and focus on exercise for fun and health rather than weight loss. And it’s especially important that our children see that my husband and I both enjoy cooking and eating tasty food. We try to follow Michael Pollan’s guidelines from In Defense of Food, especially his advice to sit down to meals together and eat only things my great-grandmother would recognize as food. After trick-or-treating we read together the labels on candy my kids received and had them decide what seemed most like “food” and was therefore worth eating (not much!).

Distorted views about food, dieting, and body image are pervasive even among health professionals, especially with current, often legitimate, concerns about childhood obesity. A friend of mine with two daughters told me about a nutritionist who was invited to speak to her daughter’s second grade class about healthy eating. Her advice to the children was not to eat certain foods because they would get fat. One look at the children in that classroom would have told her that obesity was probably not an issue for them. In what may have been a desire to simplify eating guidelines, she missed an opportunity to focus on nutritional content of foods.

In a world where my children see wasp-waisted, busty Disney characters as heroines and movie stars with rail-thin bodies, it’s a challenge to counter those images of beauty. At home we try to disassociate food and body shape, and instead model an appreciation for healthy, tasty food and active living. But I think we may have our work cut out for us.

Mothering at Mid-Career: Remembering a Master Teacher

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:14:14 GMT

I learned a few days ago that one of my high school teachers, Otis Benson Davis, died last week. O.B., as we all called him (only behind his back - -to his face he was, of course, Mr. Davis), graduated from Kent School in 1942 and returned to teach there full time in 1949. He retired from active teaching only a few years ago, in 2006.

I graduated from Kent 36 years after O.B. did. He was my AP English teacher, my senior year; he was also the English department chair, and his influence was pervasive in the department. He was the co-author of the textbook we used for AP English, The Idea of Man (now out of print), and he was the teacher who introduced me to Hamlet, King Lear, and Oedipus as well as Out of the Silent Planet and Point of No Return. O.B. didn't think that, as 17 and 18-year-olds, we were too young to "get" dramas of middle and old age such as Point of No Return and King Lear; he didn't think we needed to be pandered to or coddled. I might choose different books than he did to teach seniors in high school -- I imagine he chose different books, too, over the years -- but I still remember what we read and, especially, his presence in the classroom, pushing, probing, questioning so that we read better, read deeper.

Part of AP English then -- and, I imagine, now -- involved drafting the college essay. My first draft, as I recall it, was unimpressive. O.B. wrote in the margin that it was a "cursory adumbration" of a much better essay. I had to look up "adumbration." I didn't ask him to define it; I knew it was my job to figure out what he meant and then to act on it. We sat around a seminar table in his class and discussed our essays, and the books we were reading, and started to feel like scholars.

We weren't, of course, but his confidence in us was, at least for me, infectious. When I started teaching I thought of O.B. all the time. I couldn't emulate him as a teacher -- I didn't have his gravitas, his beard, his pipe. But I could and did remember the care he took with my essays, the love he had for literature. His was the approval I sought, the criticism I learned from, the example that inspired me. I can't say for sure that I'm an English professor because O.B. was my teacher, but I know he was a part of what made me choose the path I did. I did have the chance to say "thank you," years later, and I'm glad I did, but I'll say it again.

Thank you, O.B. Rest in peace.

Career Coach: What Do Mothers Want?

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:06:41 GMT

I was moved by a number of the responses to last week’s column. I find it really helpful when people share their stories, humanizing what is otherwise cold (though interesting) data and speculation. I felt, though, that several writers fell into traps which, because they’re all too common, I’d like to address here.

The first is the tendency to generalize from one’s own experience, or “I was able to handle _______; therefore, what are you whining about?” This stance presupposes identical, or at least equivalent, circumstances, but these almost never occur outside of controlled experiments. Not all women are in command of the timing of their pregnancies, for example, and not everyone feels entitled to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Not all pregnancies and deliveries are problem-free, and not all children are born healthy. Not all families or universities are supportive to the same degree.

The second is the confusion of the terms “parent” and “mother.” In the program I attended, it wasn’t the “parents” who were exiled to the mommy track; it was the mothers. The dads did just fine. As Dana’s and Libby’s recent columns on the “opt-out revolution” demonstrate, it’s not generally “parents” who leave the workforce because of the dearth of “family-friendly” options. I think it’s important to make this distinction, not because dads don’t deserve consideration too, but because failing to acknowledge that the burden of childrearing still falls mainly on women can lead to victim-blaming. Expecting mothers of young children to always attend class on time and always hand in papers on time, without providing any backup or leeway, is often a setup for failure.

Which leads to the third trap, which I have tried to find a snappy, nonjudgmental name for but which I can only, finally, characterize as a failure of compassion. As “AdjunctMom” asks, “Does everything have to be a competition?” Can we listen to “Always Amazed,” who is more stressed by the “emotional battering” of undermining fellow students than by the demands of parenting while in school?

In addition to being the primary caregivers for our children, women are usually the ones to care for aging parents, disabled siblings, and, because of typical age and health differentials, ailing spouses. Some of us might choose to delay or forgo having children in order to pursue a career, but unless we isolate ourselves from all familial ties and obligations, most of us will end up, at some point, exhausted, with our fingers jammed in the dike. It might be helpful to keep this in mind when we blame others for their poor choices or for asking for the occasional pass.

Math Geek Mom: Maternity leave and my first year (Mod 7)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:47:12 GMT

If you try to divide 365 by 7, it does not come out evenly. 364, however, does divide evenly, meaning that if you divide 365 by 7, you get a remainder of one. This fact, when coupled with information on leap years (every 4 years), non-leap years (what should be leap years, but end in 10) and “re-instated” leap years (years that end in 10 that should be a leap year, but also are divisible by 200, such as 2000 was), one is able to use this information to fairly easily learn what day of the week any day in history falls on. This is the trick used by entertainers who easily rattle off the day of the week of people’s date of birth and of important historical events. It relies on the mathematical idea of congruencies, which allows us to solve problems where the solutions must be integers and is the basis of much of the cryptography that is used in computer based commerce. We would describe the fact that 365 has a remainder of 1 when divided by 7 by writing it as 365 ≡ 1(mod 7), read as “365 is congruent to 1, modulo 7” If we had a clock with 7 hours on it, the clock would rotate 52 times and then one more hour, as if it had moved only one hour.

I thought of this recently when I stumbled upon my first entry in this forum, and realized that the date fell on a Saturday this year, instead of the Friday from last year. As the year moved forward by one year, the “remainder” day brought us to the next day of the week. Wow, I have been writing this for one whole year, I realized!

It has been an interesting year. In that year I learned many things. I learned that I CAN write an essay under pressure, and that sometimes the ones that I write at the last minute are the best. I learned that not every college nurtures its adjuncts like we do, although I suspect that most adjuncts wish they did. And I learned that there is an “anti-adoption” movement out there. This movement found me in response to an entry I wrote, before I later found out more about them through the miracle of on-line searches. I suggest that anyone interested in learning more about this movement initiate a similar search. And then, as I re-read my first post, I realized that my involvement with “Mama, Ph.D” has been longer than one year, but has covered quite a few years, to be exact.

I stumbled upon a call for papers for the book “Mama, Ph.D.” while searching for information on maternity leaves at other schools during my last round on the Faculty Benefits Committee. I was determined to design a maternity leave policy for our college, and, if nothing else, get the Tenure Committee (which I was also on) to recognize maternity issues as a reason to adjust the tenure clock. I was not successful at either, but did find Mama, Ph.D. in the process, and began to think of myself as a writer as well as a Math Geek. Now that I have begun nurturing this creative side of my personality, I am back to the mission that set me on this path. I am back on the Faculty Benefits Committee, and I want to hear from colleagues about the maternity policies at their schools.

Ursuline, like most of the colleges in our area, relies on short-term disability leaves to grant faculty maternity leave, which means that new fathers and adoptive parents are not eligible. Although Family and Medical Leave is available to faculty, they must pay premiums out of pocket during the time away from work. This, while not perfect, is actually generous when compared to what is available to most of the staff.

And so, I put out the question for all of my readers; what kind of maternity leave does your college provide? I hope to hear from people from all different types of colleges; small, large, in-between, public, private, religious, etc. Indeed, I have begun the conversation on my own, among faculty peers at various colleges, and have heard many interesting things.

The most remarkable story has to be the one I heard third hand recently. A professor, nine months pregnant, was not allowed to begin her maternity leave until she went into labor. Amazed at this, she asked her superiors what to so if her water broke in front of the class. Their reply was that it would be a biohazard and that they would e-mail her a copy of the relevant protocol for dealing with such a situation.

PLEASE tell me that someone has a better approach to designing a maternity leave than the one that woman faced at her school! And, while we are at it, I would be interested in hearing about sick day policies at other schools, especially for those of us who teach courses that are difficult to find substitutes for at the last minute.

Motherhood After Tenure: masks

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:14:13 GMT

Halloween has never been my favorite holiday, despite my love of chocolate. As a reserved introvert I’ve always dreaded costume parties. It’s taken me years to grow comfortable with my everyday costume, my carefully constructed persona. But now that I’m the mother of an exuberant extrovert, I’m learning to put my dignity aside and get into the spirit.

My daughter doesn’t have school tomorrow and so I’m taking her to campus with me. I’ve never done this before; previously she was too young and unruly. Now, at 5, she’s capable of sitting still and drawing or reading for an hour at a time. Plus she likes being “a big girl” and so will happily adopt a poised manner if strangers are watching.

Still, I’m nervous because I usually keep my two roles separate. Frankly I’m a more polished professor than I am a mother. At work, I can control my environment and undergraduates – while sometime energetic and sometimes sluggish — are always easier to manage than my willful, buoyant, moody daughter.

As one of the only UW campuses without an on-site daycare, children are a rare sight. While most people seem delighted to see my daughter, I feel less professional when I’m with her, like wearing pajamas to work. There have been spirited debates about bringing children to campus. I’ve always encouraged student parents to bring their children, when appropriate. Yet I function better when I focus on one or the other. Walking down the hallway seems to announce that I’m not really working. And of course, I’m no longer a professor: I’m a mom.

I have two classes tomorrow: an upper-level course on the English novel in which we’ll be discussing Frankenstein and a freshman seminar on the culture of food. In between classes we will eat lunch like “big girls” at the student cafeteria — a treat my daughter has been looking forward to for weeks. I have too, if truth be told. I rarely eat lunch at the cafeteria; I’m usually eating at my computer or preparing for class. Bringing my daughter in, while not keeping me from teaching (I hope!), will keep me from doing all of the myriad tasks I usually perform while at work: grading midterms, answering emails, dashing about campus to pick up books. With a five year old in tow, everything will move much slower and I can’t count on being able to sit and concentrate uninterrupted for very long.

This week, as a test-run, I brought my daughter with me when giving a speech to a local high school honors society. I talked about the importance of making mistakes, the necessity to develop one’s own voice, and the power of authenticity. As I spoke, my daughter beamed at me, distracting me but also reminded me of how frightening it can be to reveal oneself, to expose the different aspects of our lives. And how delightful.

Now I just need to muster the courage to walk around my neighborhood dressed as catwoman. Wish me luck.

ABC’s and PhD’s: Indie Scholars

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:53:20 GMT

Last week, for Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee reviewed a three-day event held at the University of Iowa called “Platforms for Public Scholars." This symposium had as its goal the discussion of integrating humanities studies in academic institutions with civic work. It’s a difficult problem to connect the academy with the public. The tenure hierarchy was pointed out as a struggling point for this, as it’s hard to engage academics in collaborative work with the community since it often does not contribute to promotion. Coming from the science side (I don’t know the humanities very well) I’ve also seen issues with scientists who are not motivated to effectively convey their studies to the public, and stigmas surrounding faculty who write science for a popular audience. And this disconnect works both ways, as one commenter brought up, as evidenced by cases where institutions establish a venue to promote discourse with the “interested public” only to find no attending audience.

Some comments to Scott’s article also brought up a similar disconnect at another level: i.e. between independent scholars from outside the academy and with academics within. One wrote: “If and when [independent scholars] make attempts to engage with university scholars, we are met with polite skepticism at best.”

I find independent scholarship an interesting idea with a lot of undeveloped potential. There is a considerable number of independent scholars out there (especially in these times when far more PhDs are produced than can be assimilated into traditional, increasingly competitive academic positions); many of them notable, respectable contributors to their fields who, for a diversity of reasons, work on their intellectual passions with little or no connection to the ivory tower.

Becoming associated and recognized is a big hurdle that independent scholars need to overcome. There are several associations for independent scholars that provide a cornerstone for supporting and promoting these outside-of-academia academics. Two of the largest are the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars (which has even produced the “Independent Scholars’ Handbook”). Smaller organizations within these umbrellas bring together scholars at a more local, personal level (for example, the Princeton Research Forum and others), if you’re lucky enough to be close enough to one to participate.

Despite the existence of these organizations, I’d say for most independent scholars (and I include myself in this club) right now it’s a hard and lonely road. The basic need for access to library facilities, the lack of interactions with collaborators and co-authors and colleagues to read manuscripts, and difficult access to grants, funding, and even publishing opportunities are real issues. This recent blog from the Times Higher Education exposés another difficulty: finding a professional identity in order to relate to colleagues at meetings. And with only a small framework for interaction these scholars have no voice.

BUT, there is a powerful force that is in the early stages of pulling these independents together: new media. I just discovered a support thread through the forums on Chronicle for Higher Education in which some Independent Scholars have recently come together in the beginnings of accessible discussion of the challenges they face. I expect we’ll hear more and more from this population as they use the blossoming array of social media to discover exciting new energy and strength in developing community.

It seems to me also, that there is a potential mutualism that has not been realized. Academia could contribute much to the development of independent scholarship, and there is just as much that Independent Scholars could give back – for one example, perhaps, by using their freedom to establish links between academia and projects in the public realm. A little give and take on both sides could at least ease the wall that often develops between independent and affiliated scholars, and I’m hoping to see this happen with the strengthening of the independents’ voice.

Mothering at Mid-Career: Bullet Points on women in the news

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:19:43 GMT

--Joann Lipman notes in the New York Times that women's advances in the work force seem to have stalled since 9/11/2001, despite the fact that women make up half the work force, and "mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families." As one of those major breadwinners, I could wish that Lipman had followed through on her analysis of the reasons for women's lack of progress in the work force. Instead, the article ends with advice that sounds like it came from a women's magazine, not the "paper of record: she advises women to be self-confident, have a sense of humor, and "don’t be afraid to be a girl." It's not quite clear how following this advice would have kept reporters from making fun of Hillary Clinton's "cankles," however, let alone how it would help women achieve pay equity.
--Manohla Dargis, also writing in the Times, suggests that "for actresses, it is no longer enough to be young and beautiful onscreen, they have to be dead and famous, too." She notes that, since 2000, "six of the best actress awards were for biographical performances, most of dead women." I'm not sure what this suggests, but it doesn't sound good. How does this piece relate to Lipman's? Do Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Julia Child, and Amelia Earhart represent better role models for contemporary feminists than Hillary Clinton? Inquiring minds want to know—but since I don't have time to watch movies, I can't judge.
--Then again, Francine Prose reviews Gail Collins's book, When Everything Changed, and suggests that the women's movement did indeed make a difference. At least, as she points out, our employers can no longer ask our weight as part of the employment process. Unless perhaps we are auditioning for the part of a dead woman. Or running for office (see Lipman, again).
--Bringing this back to the academy: Susan O'Doherty's blog post on having a baby in grad school seemed to touch a chord for a number of readers. O'Doherty's blog post references Mary Ann Mason's piece in the Chronicle on the same topic, and I'm especially struck by all the comments on both pieces. I didn't see Mason asking for the academy to accommodate graduate student parents—rather, she seemed to be wondering out loud why more graduate students didn't become parents, given that both biologically and, in some cases, professionally, it may be the best time to do so. (She makes a big exception for the sciences, however.)
--For me, having a baby in graduate school was easier than doing it on the tenure track. In graduate school I had flexible hours, excellent health care, and a husband on the same schedule as mine. As a tenure-track assistant professor I had more money but far less time.
--But that's just me. I finished my Ph.D. when there was still a little bit of money in the University of California system, and that made a big difference, as did supportive friends and a terrific cooperative nursery school. Since my second child was born, however, my home institution has started providing a workable parental leave policy. So if I were making the decision today, the tenure track might seem a more hospitable environment for child-bearing than graduate school.
--What to do with all of the above? Clearly gender has not ceased to be an issue for the academy or the culture at large. My hope is that this generation of young women—my daughter, my students — will be able to change the conversation a bit, shifting the focus to the things we share with our male colleagues, our childless colleagues, with breadwinners and part-timers. And maybe by then we'll have some role models who aren't dead yet.

Career Coach: Having a Baby in Grad School

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:46:50 GMT

In this week’s Chronicle, Mary Ann Mason discusses reasons why relatively few students, especially women, opt to have children during the graduate school years. The entire essay is worth reading, but I was struck by one of the comments: “There's also the problem of isolation. Having a baby can be (not always -- but can be) very isolating, and so can graduate school.”

This was my impression during my graduate school years. I was pregnant for only a brief time in graduate school before I miscarried, but because I wanted a baby I was acutely aware of, and curious about, the experiences of mothers in my program.

The program we attended was fairly rigid. Students were expected to attend full-time, to hand in assignments on time, to and to spend summers in field placements. If you were unable to keep up, you were supposed to drop out, or, less drastically, apply for half-time status. The only people I knew in the half-time program were mothers, and my sense, and that of other full-time students, was that they had been cast off the ship and expected to row their own lifeboats. The first year of half-time status, the mother would at least know other students in her classes, but after that, she would drop behind, and so each year she would be alone among classmates who studied together, ate meals together, and partied together. And of course she would have no extra energy to pursue friendships with her new classmates, who were only going to be hers for a year, anyway.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I got pregnant again after finishing my coursework and internship. I defended my dissertation two weeks before my due date, four weeks before my son was born. Looking back, it’s hard for me to imagine getting to that point without the support of my dissertation group—or, for that matter, getting through my classes without friends to commiserate with, to coach me in statistics, and to remind me that the Theories of Personality paper was due this Wednesday, not next week. And given how exhausted I was for the three years following my son’s birth, I know I could not have kept up with either my work or my social connections.

Graduate school is isolating in that the intensity serves to separate students from non-student peers. If they’re cut off from fellow students as well, “doomed” doesn’t seem too strong a term.

Math Geek Mom: Palindromes and Growing Up

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:15:58 GMT

When my daughter was barely five years old, I told her the phone number of someone we knew, a number that went something like “8448”. I then told her that the number was special, since it was a “palindrome”, and was the same forward and backwards. She looked up at me, and, without missing a second, said “Like Hannah Montana?” It took me a few seconds to realize that the word “Hannah” in Hannah Montana is, indeed, a palindrome, as it is spelled the same forward and backward. I suspect that they had been talking about this in her pre-kindergarten class, but also realized that she had been exposed to Hannah Montana from watching the Disney channel, one of the last bastions of commercial-free TV (depending on how you define a commercial), besides PBS and one of the few stations that I let her watch. However, it has become clear that the people who brought us Winnie-the-Pooh and Mickey Mouse have now put their energy into presenting shows about teenagers and their angst. I thought of this a few weeks ago as I wrote about lip gloss being given out as a "girl toy" by McDonald’s, and later read the responses to it.

I always try to be grateful to anyone who takes the time to respond to my entries, even when their responses are angry or critical, since I know that they spent time writing a response that could have been spent other ways (an idea might recall from my past notes on “opportunity cost”). I just want to be clear that in complaining about McDonald’s, I did not mean to propose in that entry that McDonald’s is good food for our children (clearly it is not) or that Barbie should be banned from all of our homes. Rather, I wanted to raise the question of whether it was appropriate to give lip gloss to little girls who were still small enough to be filled up by four chicken nuggets and some slices of apple. Could they not have found another "girl toy" to include in the meal?

But what McDonald’s is doing is similar to what Disney is doing, with their marketing of Hannah Montana and other teen-age dramas. And a similar phenomena is happening in the department stores, where a move from size 6X to size 7 means a move from fashion designed for little girls to those designed for teenagers, or even for young women in their early 20s. Often this means having few appropriate options to choose from in selecting clothes for children as young as kindergarteners.

I have taken this complaint “on the road” and brought it up in several groups of mothers that I have found myself in, both academic and non-academic, and I am generally receiving comments that agree with me. One mother of a young teenager said that she can only find padded bras for her daughter, who just barely needs one to begin with. And one grandmother told the story of trying to buy clothes for her granddaughter who was turning six. After going to several stores and being disgusted by the low-cut necklines and shirts designed to show bellies, she finally found one top that was cut appropriately. Just before she brought it to the register, however, her youngest daughter, who was shopping with her, noticed that the print on the shirt was a repeating pattern of skulls. The grandmother gave up and bought a gift certificate!

My daughter will be growing up soon enough, and I feel that the marketing of toys and clothes to her that do not adequately reflect her age is disturbing. Last summer, it was difficult to find a one piece bathing suit for her, and I am sure that next summer, it will be even more difficult. Is there some way to tell the people who make these products that I want appropriate toys and clothes for my little girl? Can someone think of who to boycott to get the message across?

I feel lucky, because, for now, she goes to a school that requires her to wear a uniform, so some of these issues are avoided. However, I cannot protect her from popular culture forever, as evidenced by the fact that she not only knows about Hannah in Hannah Montana, but also how to spell it, forward and backwards.