To Find Happiness in Academe, Women Should Just Say No

By Rena Seltzer

Brecht Vandenbroucke for The Chronicle

I work with some of the most brilliant women on the planet: academics at leading colleges and research universities.

My coaching clients succeeded early in their careers by working hard and saying yes when opportunities came their way. But by the time they come to me, their schedules are killing them. A case in point is Dierdre, who called in despair, exclaiming, “I’m surrounded by great colleagues, I have smart, motivated students, and I can study topics that excite me, but it’s just too much. Every day I’m sure I’ll be able to work on my writing tomorrow, and then my day is completely full and I fall into bed exhausted, and I still haven’t opened my manuscript.”

Dierdre’s difficulty in finding time for research and writing is a challenge that confronts academics at all career stages — and women in particular. Other academic duties come with near-term deadlines. The lecture must be written before class on Monday, the applications must be read and ranked before the meeting on Wednesday, the report must be submitted to the granting agency next week. Professors put off work on their own articles or books until they can find the time, but the time never comes.

My previous career as a therapist in a college town led me to coach professors. When I work with someone like Dierdre, who is drowning in commitments, the first thing I do is issue a challenge to find 10 things to say no to. I explain that they can accept, decline, or counteroffer. Deirdre agreed to try for five. How many would you be able to find? In addition to obvious ones, like turning down an invitation, you can use delaying tactics. Thus a decision not to rework last year’s lecture, sitting on your hands when the department chair asks for a volunteer to pick up a cake, or postponing a student meeting all count as no.

When she called the following week, Dierdre had found four times to say no and was contemplating a fifth. She told her students they could skip a reading, which meant that she didn’t have to reread the article herself; she decided not to travel over a holiday break; she decided against attending a conference; and she skipped parts of a department-sponsored program. She was also considering postponing a collaborative project with a local company, although it would provide opportunities for her students.

Dierdre struggled with each decision. The class reading would have illustrated something valuable. She had recently moved for this job, and she missed her family back home. The collaborative project depended on connections that had taken time to forge, and she wondered if those relationships would hold up.

It helped for Dierdre to identify what each no would allow her to say yes to: yes to writing, yes to getting settled in her new town, yes to a strong start on other projects before adding a new collaboration. Although she grappled with how to set priorities for competing demands, she was motivated to change, since her job and her physical and emotional health depended on it.

There are trade-offs. A management professor told me I had to be the most expensive coach on earth, because after we talked about the need to let some projects go, she turned down a lucrative consulting gig to create time to write. Someone else confessed that she had skipped a meeting and, as a result, missed her surprise baby shower. However, my clients wanted the long-term career benefit of time for their research more than they wanted the things they gave up. Setting the boundaries needed to achieve one’s career goals while maintaining life balance requires awareness, skills, and practice.

Time-use studies have revealed that the difficulty Dierdre faced in preserving her research time is common among female academics. Compared with their male counterparts, women spend more time on teaching, mentoring, and service. Although men and women do similar amounts of professional service, which often carries visibility and prestige, women spend more hours doing service to the university, and are more likely to serve in time-intensive lower-status positions such as director of undergraduate studies.

Women are less conditioned to ask for what they need, and when they do speak up, they are more likely to face social sanctions. Students expect female faculty members to be more nurturing. Women of color and those from other underrepresented groups must also contend with biases related to race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

The good news is that female academics can take steps that will help them to succeed. Here are eight crucial steps to leading a balanced life:

• Keep your eyes on the prize. A strong research profile puts you in position to support students and gives you a greater say in the future of your department, college, and profession. Saying no to small requests allows you to say yes to things that matter.
• Beware of gender-role conflicts. One female professor, despite being under tremendous pressure to publish, was planning to take time off when her in-laws came to visit. When she summoned her courage and asked if they could babysit while she worked, they immediately agreed, and were delighted to have time alone with their grandkids. Take time for things that fill your heart, but avoid burdening yourself out of a gender-based sense of duty.
• Negotiate — the right way — for your needs. Women need to ask for what they want, but they risk sanctions for being too aggressive. Research suggests that framing the request as good for the organization mitigates this bias. For example, a professor requesting funds for conference travel might frame the trip as important for recruiting, or as giving her institution a presence on the national stage.
• Negotiate at home as well as at work. Academic women value their own and their partners’ careers equally, but male academics value their own careers ahead of those of their wives.
• Working mothers in general put in about five hours more a week on paid and unpaid work than working fathers do. In addition to tasks such as picking up the kids, women must make sure their spouses also handle their share of such responsibilities as coordinating the carpool.
• Use tools like rubrics to keep grading manageable. This is both a time-preserving and pedagogically sound practice, because feedback is most useful when it is timely.
• Ask more of your helpers. When I asked one professor if her students could be doing more to move their joint research forward, she worried about protecting their time. She noticed, though, that the advisees of a demanding colleague were completing their degrees with more publications on their CVs. After realizing the benefit to her students, she asked them to do more.
• Take time to recharge. I worked with a professor who couldn’t remember at the end of a proposal what she had read at the start. She asked me if there were brainteasers she could practice to strengthen her memory. After a long-planned two-week vacation, not only was she more relaxed, but she told me, “I’m no longer having trouble retaining what I’ve read.” It wasn’t brainteasers that she needed, but rest and recovery.
• Don’t go it alone. A professor who spent months gathering additional data in response to a reviewer’s comments later realized that a simpler response would have sufficed. When faced with a difficult dilemma, ask a trusted colleague for input. The most successful academics are in support networks.

Female professors face a set of challenges that can be difficult to navigate but are not insurmountable. Most of the academics I coach experience their work as not simply a job or a career, but a calling. If you’ve lost the sense of joy you once found in your work, you can take heart that others have found ways to reconnect with the things they value most. The strategies of these successful academic women can serve as a road map to create the meaningful and balanced work and personal life you long for.

• View: Academic Workplace 2015

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