In 1996, Debbie Moore, an admissions staff assistant at Alabama State University who was eight months pregnant, was walking across campus one day when she ran into a top administrator who, she says, remarked, “I was going to put you in charge of [the] office, but look at you now.”
A continuing survey by the Program on Gender, Work & Family -- which I direct at American University’s law school -- has found that many mothers (in academe and other professional realms) face a chilly climate at work. And many are suing as a result. When Moore sued the university, in Moore v. Alabama State University, a federal court held that the remark, if true, would constitute direct evidence of unlawful employment discrimination. (Ultimately the case was settled through mediation and the terms remain confidential.)
In June 2000, in another federal-court case, the University of Oregon agreed to pay $495,000 to a former assistant professor who was denied tenure after she took two maternity leaves while on the tenure track. The university’s provost had told faculty members that taking maternity leave would “prejudice the case for tenure,” and criticized the plaintiff for failing to teach classes while on maternity leave and for being unable to present a paper at a conference she could not attend because of medical complications of her pregnancy.
A third case involved Katherine Zimmerman, a mother who claimed her application to the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business was turned down because of a requirement that applicants be working outside of the home at the time they applied. In order to balance her family responsibilities, Zimmerman was running a computer consulting business from her home. Her complaint charged that her business should be recognized as a “job outside the home,” and that Berkeley’s refusal to do so was evidence of bias against women with children. Ultimately, she withdrew her lawsuit. She did not gain admission into the business school, but it did add “life experience” to its list of admissions criteria, something the school insisted it had already considered.
These cases bring home an important point: The chilly climate for women at universities reflects not only stereotypes about women in general, but also stereotypes about mothers in particular. Psychological studies inventoried by the “cognitive bias working group” of the Program on Gender, Work & Family document that gender stereotypes sharply differentiate between mothers and other women. The most dramatic is a study -- forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology -- by Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu. Fiske and her colleagues worked with a group of 74 psychology undergraduates and 50 nonstudents. The researchers found in a laboratory setting that, while “business women” were rated as similar in competence to “business men” and “millionaires,” “housewives” were rated as similar in competence to the “elderly,” “blind,” “retarded,” and “disabled.”
This study helps explain a common phenomenon: Many female professors and staff members report that they felt treated like valued colleagues until they had children, and then they felt their colleagues’ assessment of their competence start to plummet. Stereotypes about caregivers may play a significant role in academe, both because standards are so high and because assessments are so subjective.
Mothers often pay the price. Just for fun, count up the number of men and women in your department. Now count the number of mothers. If there are very few mothers, it means one of two things. It may signal women who are childfree: who do not have, and never did have, an interest in having children. If that’s the case, that’s something to celebrate. It’s important that women feel they have a choice about motherhood. Academe is a key arena where women are carving out full adult lives, gay and straight, with or without without children.
On the other hand, a department with few or no mothers may also be a workplace in which women, but not men, have to sacrifice children in order to succeed. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett pointed out in Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, the long hours required to get ahead in high-powered careers means that many women who want children defer having them for fear of jeopardizing their careers. A department where most men have children but women do not may signal a chilly climate for mothers.
Bias against mothers may be blatant, of the “look at you now” variety. It may well be more subtle, as research in cognitive bias psychology has shown.
Say a faculty member devotes a day to research -- only to encounter questions the next day about whether she enjoyed her time home with her baby. If the faculty member were a man, the same action -- taking a day to focus on your research at home -- is usually automatically attributed to work rather than to family. In sharp contrast, mothers may find themselves constantly explaining that no, they really really really were at the library rather than the playground. The tendency to attribute behavior in stereotypical ways -- to work for men, to family for women -- is what social psychologists refer to as differences in “attribution.”
Cognitive bias can have other effects as well. How many times can a mother correct biased assumptions without seeming to “protest too much?” In these instances, controlling your tone of voice is so important. How much energy do mothers devote to correcting biased attributions in a carefully modulated tone that does not make colleagues uncomfortable?
It can be a tightrope, as can any attempt to correct a misperception that a mother has “lost her edge.” One mother told us that she responded to criticism by pointing out her accomplishments, only to find her collegial relationships further strained by her “bragging.” Psychological studies report that what is seen as proper self-assertion in a man may be perceived as unseemly self-promotion in a woman.
The disturbing message that I draw from all of this is that the chilly climate in academe is not produced by a few bad actors who don’t like women. Instead it stems from spontaneous and unexamined assumptions. We need to start bringing those assumptions to the fore.
Academic institutions need to think about discrimination not just by comparing the treatment of men and women; they also need to compare the treatment of mothers and others. People need to look around and assess not only whether women are surviving and thriving, but whether mothers are. General data strongly suggest that female academics have a hard time having both children and a career. Only half of the women teaching full time in four-year doctoral institutions have children. (Nearly 70 percent of the men do.)
The next step, if academe followed the corporate world, would be training programs designed to sensitize colleagues to the unexamined messages they may be sending. For example, a gender education program at the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche set up a scenario in which a man and a woman are both late to a meeting. Someone covering for the woman makes a comment about, “Oh, she must have had day care problems,” while for the man, the comment was, “What’s the matter, ole’ buddy? Are you getting too old to handle these late nights?” Both have children: The woman has two kids and is married; the man is a single father with one child. In actuality, he had been up late with his son’s fever, while the woman’s delay was due to a train derailment. The training program then broke people into groups to discuss the scenario.
Universities don’t commonly do the kinds of training that are standard fare in corporate environments. Perhaps they should. With some large settlements beginning to emerge in cases where mothers have sued universities, academic institutions may find themselves paying dearly for their institutional reluctance to deal with spontaneous and unexamined stereotypes. Somehow -- through trainings or other means -- officials need to start warming the chilly climate mothers often face at work.
If family care is no longer associated with lack of commitment and competence, fathers, too, will feel freer to spend time with children. And adults without children will find themselves freer to take time to care for parents or partners in need of family care. Changing workplace ideals to enable academics to balance work and family can improve the lives not only of mothers -- but of others as well.