A recent study on hiring in economics departments reached a disturbing conclusion: The now-ubiquitous “stop-the-clock” policies — created to allow professors to extend their time to tenure, typically by a year, after a child joins their family — have chiefly benefited men.
The effect documented in the study, “Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?,” was dramatic. Before those policies, just under 30 percent of male and female economists at the top 50 departments got tenure. After those departments adopted stop-the-clock policies, women’s chances of getting tenure in their first job dropped by 22 percent while men’s increased by 19 percent. An article on the study in The New York Times quoted Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the business school at the University of Michigan: “Giving birth is not a gender-neutral event.” During her pregnancy, “I threw up every day,” she said, and added: “Policies that are neutral in the eyes of a lawyer are not neutral in fact.”
Before institutions jump the gun and eliminate their stop-the-clock policy, they should be aware that some questions have already been raised about the findings. And another peer-reviewed study on the same topic reached a different conclusion. Published in 2013 in the Industrial and Labor Relationship Review, this study found that stop-the-clock policies helped those who used them to get tenure — men as well as women.
Despite their contradictory findings, both studies agree one thing: Poorly designed policies can backfire.
Academe has at least four different kinds of stop-the-clock policies. The first (at places like Northwestern University) automatically approves requests by any parent to pause the tenure process for the birth or adoption of a baby. The second kind (at Harvard University) allows only the “primary caregiver” to stop the clock. A third kind allows anyone with “equal or primary caregiving responsibilities” (University of Chicago) or who provides at least 50 percent of the caretaking (University of California), to stop the clock. The final major category (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) stops the clock automatically for birth mothers, but requires application, explanation of responsibilities, and approval of the provost for nonbirth parents.
Why the variation? All of these policies are struggling to achieve the same two goals:
- Goal No. 1: Change the definition of the ideal academic worker.
- Goal No. 2: Stop reinforcing an outdated definition of the ideal caregiver.
On many campuses the ideal academic worker is still defined as someone who leaves graduate school and works nonstop more than 50 hours a week for 40 years straight. That norm disadvantages childbearing women the most because “biological and tenure clocks have the unfortunate tendency to tick loudly, clearly, and at the same time,” to quote Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel in Academe.
The obvious way to solve that problem is to automatically stop the tenure clock for women only — as many institutions have done (Goal No. 1). But that conflicts with Goal No. 2, because tenure policies that benefit mothers only serve to reinforce them as the ideal caregiver, rather than acknowledging that male faculty members can also be caregivers worthy of institutional support.
The issue is not that “lawyers” think pregnancy is gender neutral. The real question is how to design a policy that helps level the playing field for mothers without adding yet another societal pressure that discourages fathers from equal participation in child-rearing.
Achieving both these goals requires three steps.
Acknowledge where birth mothers are different. The first step is to separate the more controversial caregiving issues from the undeniable physical ones — and ensure that women are not penalized due to pregnancy or childbirth-related impairments.
That means providing accommodations and stopping the tenure clock for pregnancy-related impairments, so that mothers can recover from the physically exacting experience of giving birth. Even after a vaginal birth where all goes well, the mother typically is exhausted and in pain due to ongoing contractions, heavy bleeding, vaginal tears, and consequent stitches. (Sorry to be graphic but we’ve heard enough talk about “baby vacations” to make this necessary.)
If a mother has a cesarean section, which account for a third of births these days, she will have even more stitches: It’s major abdominal surgery. You would not expect someone who just had a kidney removed to be up and at ‘em a few days later, nor should you expect someone who just had a C-section.
Institutions must ensure that faculty members who care for children, the elderly, or the sick are not penalized for doing what any responsible family member would do.
The physical demands of pregnancy and childbirth permit institutions to provide birth mothers with a quarter or semester of additional time on their tenure clock. Why so long? For women without complications, doctors typically certify six weeks’ recovery for a vaginal birth, and two months for a C-section. Assuming she is able to teach until the day she gives birth, it is still not practical to have someone teach for six weeks, and then take six to eight weeks off. It’s a matter of administrative convenience and for many courses, good pedagogy, to give a woman the whole quarter or semester off so that professors and students aren’t forced to do a midsemester shuffle.
The only alternative is to have the pregnant professor squeeze in all the classes she will miss into the weeks before she’s due. But requiring women to condense their courses into half a semester or spend the first half putting in extra work preparing for a switchover would most likely be illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act unless other professors with temporary disabilities are required to do the same as a condition of taking leave. That’s not practical.
It goes without saying that maternal disability leave, and the clock stoppage that should accompany it, is available only for women. But it’s not a man-versus-woman thing. It’s available only for the women who give birth, because they are the only ones who have to recover from childbirth. It’s legal for the same reason.
Adopt sex-neutral policies on caregiving. Babies do not pop out and walk away. Nor do they fit neatly into a pouch. They need round-the-clock care.
State and federal law require that policies on children’s caregiving must be sex neutral — that is, offered equally to men and women. But those policies do not have to be offered equally to caretakers and noncaretakers. We know from personal experience how those policies can backfire: One of us (Joan) designed a leave policy around 1987 that automatically approved requests and was the first to use it (to nurse her newborn), followed by a man who announced he was going to Mardi Gras during his leave, and another who used it to write an academic article.
Nearly 30 years later, women still do more child care than men, including a highly disproportionate amount of baby care. If campuses don’t explicitly link leave and stop-the-clock policies to child care, why shouldn’t men — or a noncaretaker of any gender — use it to go to Mardi Gras? The more diligent will use the leave to write articles, making a policy meant to level the playing field for women into an affirmative-action program for men.
The solution is to tie child-care leave and stop-the-clock policies to caregiving, which is what most policies do. The question is how.
Limiting such policies to the “primary caregiver” is not the answer. That’s code for “mother” and everyone knows it. Fathers will face skepticism if they try to use such policies, and may be openly discouraged from doing so, which is a perfect set-up for a sex-discrimination lawsuit (because you are treating similarly situated men differently than women).
At a deeper level, the “primary caregiver” formulation sends the message that there is “naturally” only one, which reinforces breadwinner-homemaker gender roles. The phrase “primary or equal caregiver” is better, but has a subtle drawback. Men tend to overestimate the equality of their household arrangements. That been documented over and over again, most recently in a Pew Research Center study. So a policy written in this way leaves the door open to fathers who change a few diapers and see that as equal.
It’s best on this front to leave little to the imagination. Harvard’s workload-reduction policy does exactly this. It requires professors to certify that they are doing at least 20 hours of child care between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. That solution is not perfect, but nothing is. Trying to be more directive than that gets the universities too involved in micromanaging family life. But it’s a reasonable assumption that professors would be spending 40 hours a week on their jobs, so it’s also reasonable to require them to certify that they are spending half that time on child care if they want a benefit designed for people with child-care responsibilities.
Does that mean that the baby Gestapo will storm into professors’ homes to check up? Of course not. People are required to make certifications to human resources for all sorts of things, and this is simply one of them. Academic communities tend to be small. If someone is abusing the policy, people will probably know soon enough. (For a more comprehensive list of best practices on this, read “Effective Policies and Programs for Retention and Advancement of Women in Academia.”)
A best-practice stop-the-clock policy should apply not only for child care, but also for other serious caregiving responsibilities, notably elder care. Same certification: at least 20 hours a week.
Prevent stop-the-clock policies from disadvantaging those who use them. That will not be easy. The 2013 study we mentioned earlier found that, although stop-the-clock policies help with promotions,they tend to hurt with salary increases. Both men and women who stop the tenure clocks take a salary hit afterward, and men’s lasts longer. That is consistent with the findings of many studies — both in social psychology and in industrial-organizational psychology — documenting the stigma that accompanies any request in the workplace for flexibility. That stigma affects employees who signal that they are not ideal workers. Those workplace studies found specifically that men who take family leave or ask for flexibility suffer strong career detriments because they are seen as weirdly feminine. By the way, that’s sex discrimination.
Colleges and universities — 90 percent of which have stop-the-clock policies — should begin taking active steps to ensure people who use those policies are not penalized artificially (and illegally) for doing so. That’s the kind of evidence plaintiffs’ employment lawyers just love.
One step is to inform a tenure candidate’s external (and internal) reviewers that they should tally only countable time, and exclude periods when the clock was stopped. Standard language defining the time in service should be incorporated into all correspondence about searches and rank-and-tenure matters. This approach is much better than the all-too-common practice of simply telling reviewers they should not be biased; they will have no idea what you are talking about.
In short, what academe needs is better family-friendly policies, not fewer of them. We need policies that are sex-neutral but not reality-neutral. Institutions must ensure that faculty members who care for children, the elderly, or the sick are not penalized for doing what any responsible family member would do.
