Professors who want extended paid leave to care for a baby are much more likely to get it at a private university than at a public one.
A new report by the Family, Gender and Tenure Project at the University of Virginia says private institutions are almost twice as likely as public universities to offer paid leave beyond the six weeks that doctors typically authorize for women after they give birth. Thirty-four percent of private universities in the project’s study offered extended paid parental leave, compared with just 18 percent of public institutions.
The report, called “Parental Leave in Academia,” is based on a national study of 168 institutions completed in 2001 by Charmaine Yoest, a graduate student at Virginia, and Steven E. Rhoads, a professor of politics there.
“Despite the huge emphasis on recruiting and retaining women in academia,” says Ms. Yoest, “paid leave is rare.” Over all, only 26 percent of the universities had policies that offered some paid leave to mothers and fathers beyond the six-week maternity leave. An additional 23 percent of institutions lacked formal policies but reported that professors could work out extended paid leaves on an informal basis.
The study was financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Bankard Fund for Political Economy at Virginia. The report is available at http://faculty.virginia.edu/familyandtenure/institutional%20report.pdf.
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Even when universities have family-friendly policies, professors do not always take advantage of them for fear of damaging their careers. That is the finding of a study of 5,087 faculty members completed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus. About 30 percent of both men and women in the survey did not ask for parental leave for fear of “career repercussions.” About 20 percent reported that they did not ask to stop the tenure clock, even though it would have helped them manage their workload after the birth of a child.
These professors, said the researchers, “seek to hide or minimize family commitments in order to show their dedication to career.” The report -- by Robert W. Drago, a professor of labor studies and industrial relations at Penn State, and Carol L. Colbeck, an associate professor of education there -- is available online at http://lsir.la.psu.edu/workfam/mappingproject.htm
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Eighteen universities in Northern California have banded together to start a Web site that helps dual-career couples find academic jobs in the same area. Before the Web site made its debut last October, says Nancy Aebersold, who runs the dual-career service, universities couldn’t offer much help to new hires whose academic spouses were also looking for jobs.
“There wasn’t anything that existed in terms of a network to hook them into jobs at other institutions,” says Ms. Aebersold, who runs faculty recruitment-and-retention programs at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The new service is called the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium. Its 18 university members pay an annual fee to maintain the Web site, which lists all job openings for professors, administrators, and staff members. The consortium includes the Universities of California at Berkeley and at Davis, as well as Stanford University and the Foothill-De Anza Community College District.
So far this year, says Ms. Aebersold, the Web site -- http://www.bayareaherc.org -- has advertised 13,000 jobs. The site is open to anyone, so it is difficult to know how many spouses have used it to find jobs. The site has sparked interest among administrators in Southern California, where 13 universities are planning to start their own dual-career website this summer.
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How hard is it to raise children and forge an academic career at the same time? The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering recently devoted a whole issue to the topic. The title of the opening piece, “I’ve Worked Very Hard and Slept Very Little,” gives an idea of what’s to come.
In the journal’s fall-winter 2003 issue, called simply “Mothering in the Academy,” a single mother tells about the conflicts she faced while struggling to raise two young daughters during her first years as a professor of English at a liberal-arts college. She recalls trying to answer when one of her daughters asked: “Which do you love more, me or your work?”
In another article, a graduate student tells how she finished writing her dissertation in snippets of time during her maternity leave, on a desk next to her baby’s crib. Another essay, “The Best You Can Expect When You’re Expecting,” discusses parental-leave policies in academe. The journal even has poems, including one with the fourth stanza: “I am white not Anglo-Saxon/heterosexual married with 3 children/1 dog 2 cars 6 motorcycles/a writing-teaching-feminist-mother-scholar/who sees the differences between men and women/in who expects who to make the children’s lunches/taking for granted they will get fed/in who remembers whose peanut butter sandwich/is spread with jam not honey and/the color of their cups.”
The association, housed at York University, in Canada, calls itself “the first international feminist organization devoted specifically to the topic of mothering-motherhood.” The journal’s Web site is http://www.yorku.ca/crm/Journal/journal_index.htm.
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http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 31, Page A11