Last fall, after reporting on the new statement on family responsibilities and academic work approved by the American Association of University Professors, The Chronicle sponsored a Colloquy discussion on the topic. I was shocked and disheartened to read many of the 53 responses to the AAUP’s proposal that new parents receive extra time before coming up for tenure. That members of the academy would disagree on the policy was not a surprise; one would hope for an active and scholarly dialogue. But the degree of rancor, sarcasm, and contempt was disappointing.
What, I asked myself, was going on in academe to produce this degree of hostility? In a system ostensibly constructed to allow the most erudite of scholars to advance knowledge through the careful consideration of ideas and the production of empirically derived data, why are the “best and the brightest” approaching the issue of women’s advancement in the profession through closed-minded positioning rather than open-minded dialogue?
Debate, the root of which means to “beat down,” characterized the responses to the AAUP’s statement and to the individuals who shared their experiences in stopping the tenure clock, only to find themselves derided as “breeders” or “prima donnas.”
Obviously, the concept of stopping the tenure clock marks a departure from some deeply ingrained attitudes about standards of excellence in the academy. But the goal of the AAUP statement is to create opportunities for women to advance in academe. It is a fact that women are a minority in every academic rank and the average salaries for women at each rank are lower than for men. At both colleges and universities, women across all disciplines are underrepresented in tenured and tenure-track positions and overrepresented in nontenured positions, according to studies like Virginia Valian’s Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1998). Even when productivity is taken into consideration, women hold lower ranks. Women are promoted more slowly than men, and men are more likely than women to be tenured.
I am unwilling to be so cynical as to conclude that those individuals objecting to the AAUP’s statement -- on the grounds that they are defending standards of excellence -- believe that this kind of inequity should exist in the academy. And it is inconceivable that scholars who hold themselves to such high standards truly believe that the solution to this inequity is for female faculty members to “choose” not to “breed.”
The problem, it seems to me, is that issues of equity have been framed in the context of balancing work and family life. Understandably, this renders the concerns of people without children or other family obligations as irrelevant.
Recently, after addressing a state bar association about issues of gender equity in law firms, I spoke at length with the managing partner of a large, successful, and prestigious firm. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he had given considerable thought to how to balance the dual goals of equity and “the bottom line.” Unlike most large law firms, an unusually high number of employees at his firm have made use of its flexible-hours policy. While I’d expected to be expressing my admiration for and curiosity about this accomplishment, I instead found myself disagreeing with his basic premise. He insisted that some things are simply more important than others -- that time for family is of greater value than time devoted to other non-work interests. I told him that although I shared his sense of values about family, that making this the centerpiece of work-life policies would simply produce a backlash against parents from their colleagues without children. And, indeed, the responses published in The Chronicle bear me out.
But I don’t think this is merely a pragmatic point. Simply shifting the burden of unreasonable expectations from parents to non-parents begs the real question and undermines efforts to produce meaningful change. Defining work-life issues as family issues tends to marginalize these dilemmas and to suggest they are only women’s issues. And while I believe that equal opportunity for women in academe is an issue of crucial importance, I also believe that the same norms that block gender equity also undermine everyone’s effort to integrate work into the fabric of their lives.
Work should not require the sacrifice of one’s personal life -- this is good neither for individuals nor for the systems within which they work. There is ample evidence that organizational effectiveness and productivity are improved by providing workers with flexibility in distributing the hours of their lives between work and non-work activities. Overwork has become the norm, in academia and elsewhere, and nothing good has come from it. I don’t want to be treated by an overworked, stressed-out physician, to be represented by a lawyer who is pressured to work 70-hour weeks, to have my child taught by an over-stressed faculty member who can’t take the time to speak a civil word. Haven’t you noticed that people are cranky? I don’t recall road rage being a problem when I was growing up. Courtesy used to be a norm -- not a marketing tool used by department stores like Nordstrom’s.
Gender inequities in the workplace are rooted in the historic separation of spheres: the masculine sphere of paid work and the feminine sphere of domestic life. Of course, this division has been breached by the large numbers of women in today’s work force. But the legacy remains in the form of idealized images of what constitutes a good worker. As Joan Williams has noted, the “ideal worker” is someone whose commitment to work is unlimited by childbearing or rearing -- i.e., a man. Success in academia today continues to be aligned with traditional masculine stereotypes of autonomy, competitiveness, and heroic individualism. The “ideal worker” is someone for whom work is primary, the demands of family, community, and personal life secondary, and time to work unlimited. These are gendered assumptions: They are entirely different from traditional feminine stereotypes and, since women still shoulder the lion’s share of family responsibilities, they exclude women from equal opportunities to succeed at work. Policies enabling mothers of young infants to stop the tenure clock or to allow part-time tenure tracks are intended to rectify this inequity.
Assumptions about the ideal worker have created problems in addition to discrimination against women. These same assumptions require people to act as if they can compartmentalize themselves such that events in their personal lives have no effect upon their work and that the seemingly insatiable demand for time committed to work has no consequence for the worker’s life.
The reality, of course, is that lives are affected. Working parents who would like to be involved in their children’s lives are confronted with the impossibility of any semblance of normal family life if they are to meet current tenure demands and timetables. Furthermore, defining the ideal worker in terms of idealized masculinity results in a system where the most individualistic, self-focused, ambitious, and competitive members are rewarded and considered successful. Stereotypical feminine behaviors -- in particular, relational skills and emotional intelligence -- are devalued as “niceness.”
The chairman of the bar-association panel on which I participated was a college president. His concern with work-life issues also went beyond that of work and family. Didn’t the most educated and able in a society, he asked, need to devote a portion of their gifts to those less fortunate? Doesn’t our involvement in “life” inform our work? What kind of professionals are we if we define success exclusively in terms of the golden ring of tenure or partnership?
Ironically, the largely male audience of lawyers -- a group who are the regular object of jokes about greed and unethical behavior -- were more receptive to the notion that equity and “having a life” are essential to the long-term viability of the work organization as well as the culture than many of those academics responding on this site to the AAUP statement.
Perhaps too many in academe are so used to outdated, dysfunctional norms of thought and feeling that they rarely question the underlying assumptions that guide the current tenure system.
Stopping the tenure clock for the care of children, partners, and parents is a beginning. But let’s not confuse it with the ultimate goal. As Chekhov said, life and work are inseparable. Our work is not in competition with our lives -- it is merely one part of life. And in the end, we’ll be remembered for what we did with our life and how we lived it.
Ellen Ostrow is a clinical psychologist and founder of Lawyers Life Coach, which provides coaching services to female lawyers trying to balance professional success and personal lives. She has served on the psychology faculties of three universities and as a staff psychologist at several university counseling centers.
