Academe Isn’t a Leaky Pipeline

Anyone concerned with equity in academe has probably encountered the notion of the leaky pipeline, which typically describes the dearth of women at the highest ranks. This metaphor suggests that some scholars flow smoothly toward tenure and full professorships, while others — those from historically excluded groups — fall through cracks along the way.

But the metaphor is imperfect: Academic careers are rarely linear, and scholars do not passively leak out en route to their final destination. We’d do better to think of the academy as a game of Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders, depending on where you’re from). In this game, players edge forward incrementally until they land on a square that springboards them ahead of other players (a ladder) or — surprise! — plunges them backward (a chute).

Spin the wheel to take a turn: Your new job is on the opposite side of the country, away from family and support systems, and your child is too sick for day care again. You miss an important meeting to care for her — take a step back.

How many steps back can one take before deciding to forfeit the game? The people who “make it” often have invisible advantages that provide manhole covers for the chutes and extensions for the ladders: a well-connected adviser, a partner willing to take on the bulk of child care, family money that eases the pinch of an inadequate graduate stipend. Those who exit the game tend to be people from lower-ranked institutions, women, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and first-generation scholars (or combinations thereof). These scholars may not be privy to the hidden curriculum; they often have off-campus responsibilities that the profession, as currently set up, renders incompatible with a successful academic career. Success in academe is often about perseverance, but how long can we reasonably expect scholars to persevere without losing hope of climbing the ladders?

Spin the wheel again: Take three steps forward because your department has strong parental-leave policies. Take a step back because your professional association does not offer child care at the annual conference; you miss it to stay home with your child. Take 10 steps forward if your degree is from a top-10 institution.

Chutes can open up beneath scholars for many reasons, but those who are parents face an especially uncertain future on the road to professorship. In researching experiences of parenthood in academe, we anonymously surveyed more than 300 colleagues at all levels of the profession. Our respondents illuminated the good, the bad, and the ugly, highlighting benevolent mentors who used research funding to support parental leave for graduate students and — on the other end of the spectrum — department chairs who refused accommodations for faculty members who had just given birth, requiring them to return to the classroom just days after leaving the hospital. While individual mentors can certainly help scholars dodge the chutes and locate the ladders, our career trajectories shouldn’t depend on the good fortune of encountering generous senior scholars.

Academe needs systemic reform. Here are some places to start:

• Colleges and departments should offer transparent and equitable family-leave policies for students, faculty, and staff members. Where policies like tenure-clock extensions, flexible teaching modalities, and parental leave do not exist, universities and departments must establish them. Leave policies should include non-birth parents. Departments should ensure that parents use leave to parent; this starts with clear expectations and norms about the purpose of leave. We must resist the tendency to view parental leave as “extra time” in which a scholar can dig into research or go on the job market. In the long run, such policies normalize all family structures and reduce the motherhood penalty.

• Colleges and departments should clearly communicate family-leave policies. One should not need to have a “family friendly” department chair in order to get fair accommodations. Universities must ensure that policies are easy to locate and understand, and that they’re equitably enforced. Individual students, faculty, and staff members should learn all they can about relevant policies on family leave, stopping dissertation or tenure clocks, and tenure and promotion. By understanding existing policies, individuals can ensure that they are being treated fairly and, if not, can pursue a remedy.

• Colleges and departments should establish equitable and parent-friendly hiring practices. When conducting campus interviews for new faculty members, hiring committees should ensure that candidates have “no questions asked” blocks of private time and space conducive to expressing breast milk, attending to medical conditions, or talking with human-resources officials about job opportunities for a partner. All job candidates should be provided with information related to child care on campus (which we strongly encourage colleges and universities to establish) and related issues, like family leave.

• Scholars should prioritize mentoring early-career colleagues, students, and even peers. Throughout the pandemic, informal mentorship via social-media posts or practice Zoom job talks has become a lifeline for early-career scholars. These efforts made informal mentorship more accessible, erasing the barriers of travel costs and geographic distance. These efforts can and should continue. Formal mentorship, such as conference roundtables and workshops, also offers a space for early-career scholars to learn about the profession. It is especially important that men pick up the slack on this front: Women should not be the only ones doing the valuable work of keeping other women in the profession.

Such reforms are crucially important to our post-pandemic future. The last year and a half has exacerbated existing inequities, and the ripple effects will continue for years to come. One indicator of a deepening gender divide is the observation that women submitted fewer manuscripts to journals in 2020, suggesting that women, more than men, have carried the extra weight of pandemic care work at home and in the transition to virtual work. Our Black, Indigenous, and other people-of-color colleagues and students have also borne a heavier load throughout the pandemic, including a higher likelihood of losing loved ones. Our immunocompromised colleagues and students continue to face higher risk. In the coming months, parents with children too young to be vaccinated will have to navigate continually-changing risk assessments, school closures, and quarantines — on top of the usual sick days and snow days.

As it stands, academe is a zero-sum game. There are a finite number of jobs, and the pandemic has created a years-long backlog of talented scholars who are skipping turns in the academic game as they wait for the job market to open up. As a profession, we need to identify, and change, the factors that push some talented scholars down the chutes while others ascend the ladders with relative ease. As we work over the long term to create the equitable policies needed to ensure a more-humane profession, the chutes will no longer be quite so many, or so gaping. Imagine what all those who are busy dodging chutes could accomplish if academe embraced the whole scholar.

This essay is based on the authors’ book, The Ph.D. Parenthood Trap: Caught Between Work and Family in Academia, coming in October 2021 from Georgetown University Press.