In the recent furor over remarks by Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, about why so few women go into math and science, one key issue seems to be getting lost. Among other points, Mr. Summers suggested that women don’t want to work the 80-hour weeks required for an academic career. Eighty hours?
Is that really good for women? For anyone?
What has happened to our academic workplace?
Let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time -- some 35 years ago -- in a country not very far away, in a landscape that would look familiar in many ways, there was a very strange academic world. Women were a tiny minority in graduate programs; in the social sciences and history, women earned only some 13 percent of doctorates. Indeed, there were fewer women in visible positions in the profession than there had been a generation before, when Nellie Nielson was president of the American Historical Association in 1943. (There would not be another female president until Natalie Zemon Davis in 1987.)
When we women entered graduate school in the 1960s, we did so on a slanted playing field. There were virtually no senior female faculty members in our graduate programs, few female professors at any level of higher education. (In the women’s college I attended, there were a substantial number of female faculty members, but relatively few were married, fewer had grown children, and the female professor who was raising young children was so rare as to be an anomaly: “Did you hear,” the chilling word went around, “she had a miscarriage on the stairs in Barnard Hall?” )
In graduate schools, senior male professors were often (though not always) unenthusiastic about accepting female students, partly because they felt awkward about working with women, partly because they knew that even when women wrote brilliant dissertations they would not be likely to find jobs worthy of their talents. Alumni gatherings at annual disciplinary meetings were such inhospitable occasions of male bonding (literally, “smokers”) that, in history, women began meeting at breakfast -- the only part of the day where we could carve out a space of our own.
Throughout the learned societies, they forced the establishment of committees on the status of women. Because some of the members of those committees grew up to be distinguished scholars and academics -- among historians, for example, Dorothy Ross, became chair of the department at the Johns Hopkins University; Suzanne Lebsock won the Bancroft Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Francis Parkman Prize; and Mary Frances Berry became chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights -- it is hard now to remember how vulnerable women once were in the academy. One-year appointments, tenure decisions made by three guys standing on a staircase, women penalized for working in the emerging field of women’s history.
The successes of the current generation of women have muted our memories of the risks taken by those who put themselves on the line to make it happen. The women who challenged the establishment bear the marks. Anyone for whom tenure has not been a slam-dunk will tell you that the scars never heal completely. We all know brilliant women who were driven out of the academy.
Yet we were lucky. We lived in a progressive political landscape and were supported, by the early 1970s, by the political struggles going on about us that were also skeptical of inherited wisdoms. What has been accomplished in the span of one generation is truly remarkable.
Today we tell little girls to follow their dreams; we don’t tell them they can’t be doctors or engineers or historians. We have compelled the removal of most sex-biased questions from hiring processes. In regularizing tenure procedures and modifying anti-nepotism policies, we have greatly improved university corporate practices. In enhancing women’s access to fellowships, we have helped make the academy a considerably more decent, more open, more ethical institution than it was when we began.
Now, once again, we are called to risk our dreams, to set a fresh agenda for women, and to reshape the landscape of the academy. Once again we are hearing women speak of their bitterness, of being targets of contempt, of assaults on their dignity, of sexual harassment from their own colleagues, of salary inequities, of overloaded service expectations (particularly for women of color). We hear of the continuing distrust of our ability to think, a leftover from the late-1940s backlash against a previous wave of assertive women who had taken advantage of wartime opportunities.
Academic institutions have been especially hapless in reforming policies on pregnancy and related infant and child care. A report in Academe, published by the American Association of University Professors, notes that men who, within five years of receiving their Ph.D., have babies entering their households are 38 percent more likely than their female counterparts to achieve tenure within 12 to 14 years. That is true across the liberal arts -- humanities, social sciences, biological and physical sciences -- and across four-year institutions, whether colleges or research universities.
When Anne Firor Scott undertook to review the first three volumes of Notable American Women in the mid-1970s, she struggled to find a few generalizations that would cover the majority of women who lived in the years from colonial settlement until the mid-20th century, the period covered by the books. She reported that virtually the only generalization she could make was that most of the women had done whatever made them notable after menopause. We still structure our institutions so that the generalization is not antique.
Institutional convenience, institutional rules, institutional structures still intrude into our private lives.
Women still complain of a virtual absence of coherent benefit policies that make it possible for them to be professionals and parents. They say that tenure clocks were set when a male academic profession was blithely unconcerned about biological clocks. Women who are single parents have an especially hard time. Women with roots in the working class, a group that includes a disproportionate number of women of color, are especially hurt by their institution’s failure to provide on-site child care and robust health-care coverage (including for partners).
Nor is it just mothers who are having trouble navigating the academic ladder. Men too are married -- even male scientists and economists. According to the American Council on Education’s recent report “An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers,” young male faculty members “are making career sacrifices for parenting and caregiving at a much higher rate than their senior counterparts.”
Those who thought that women were being excessively grouchy surely changed their minds when Harvard’s Summers made his remarks about women. The firestorm that broke out in response focused on the issue of innate sex differences; it largely ignored Summers’s primary assumption that the 80-hour workweek is a nonnegotiable requirement for a successful research career in the sciences (along with the implication that it does not require an 80-hour week to be successful in fields where women have made strides, like history or philosophy or English). By the way, the 80-hour metaphor translates into 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., seven days a week -- most studies suggest that those kinds of hours are worked in our society not by men, but by women who are trying to combine jobs with child care and housework.
Nor did commentators explore the implications of the metaphor “married.” Married, after all, does not mean only a reasonably predictable sex life. It is the short form of conveying “mother,” someone whose work as a parent is understood to be at odds with professional competence and ambition.
The outpouring of anger and frustration we are hearing today is invigorating: It is a sign that a shift in thinking is taking place. As more and more women join men in earning a Ph.D., the inequities of the tenure-track academic profession are becoming more apparent.
It is long past time to frame a new agenda. Once again we must re-envision how the professoriate is embodied. Once again we must redefine the boundaries of a professional career. Once again we must challenge fixed definitions of an equitable workplace. And once again, those who speak out will risk accusations of disruption, even irresponsibility. This will be the work of a generation.
But feminists -- men and women -- are better situated to solve the challenges than we once were. In the 1970s, we were demanding admission -- to degree programs, to fellowships, to tenure-track positions. In the 21st century, we have won the fellowships, we have the Ph.D.'s, many of us have tenure, some of us have distinguished chairs, some of us are deans and provosts and university presidents. What will we do with the place in the academy that we have earned?
How will we now use our optimism and our bitterness to reinvent the academy? What risks will we take?
There was a time when academic life was largely reserved for the Brahmin class: men born to wealth or at least comfortable family resources. Not until after World War II was the academy a site of social mobility, where a lower-middle-class striver might seek advancement, job security, and a good income. It is now clear that while white women’s representation has skyrocketed, women of color have rarely found upward mobility in academic life. At one Ivy League university last year, 30 percent of the faculty members in the arts and sciences -- 210 individuals -- were women, but only 9 people were African-American women, and only 3 (in a total faculty of nearly 700) were tenured.
It is also clear that, while we can take pride in opening many opportunities -- and the fellowships necessary to sustain them -- to people of equal merit, the form of those fellowships shapes their impact. When graduate aid comes in the form of teaching assistantships, as it does in my university, there is far less flexibility for taking time off. That especially affects women. The implicit message is sent: Don’t get pregnant in grad school. But other people are also put at a disadvantage. When the work of parenting is shared, having financial aid only or primarily in the form of teaching burdens both men and women. All those who have few other financial resources are apt to find themselves taking extra time on their dissertation as they struggle to earn enough to support themselves or their family.
The drift toward the use of adjunct and temporary faculty members, passing on fewer benefits and making it impossible to maintain a research agenda, also has a disproportionate impact on women (who often hold such jobs), but it too affects both men and women. The visiting job that once provided a breather while one looked for a permanent position now enables a minimal kind of survival at the cost of decreasing opportunities for stable tenure-track jobs.
Moreover, “married” is an insufficient marker of duties of care: Many mothers -- and some caregiving fathers -- are not married. And all of us, men and women, parents or not, are likely to find ourselves at some moment with close relations -- elderly parents, adult siblings, or same-sex partners stricken with cancer or suicidal depression -- who need our care. As the recent renovations in internship hospital schedules have demonstrated, 80-hour professional weeks are an old-fashioned way of displaying machismo, and they are not a healthy way for a society to organize its most subtle and significant work.
In the year and a half that I have chaired my department, I have learned a lot about human frailty. At one point last winter, there were at least seven members of a 30-person department who were heroic when they met their classes at all, and only one was coping with her own illness. The others were struggling with tragedies that afflicted spouses, children, parents, siblings. Half involved men as caregivers, one for a dying wife. The University of Iowa has prided itself on longstanding generous health care and other benefits for faculty members. But we have not begun to think collectively about how family care might be taken out of the crisis mode.
For institutions that pride themselves on their intellectual power, that neglect of a major challenge is remarkable. Should we not be amazed at how many of us desperately improvise when one of our members faces a personal crisis, as though such a thing never happened before, as though people in need of care -- infants, the aged, people temporarily sidelined by a broken leg -- are not a substantial portion of our population?
The Family and Medical Leave Act protects people from being flung out of jobs for pregnancy or family care, but the leave is unpaid. The increasingly common practice of extending the tenure clock for pregnancy, or child care, does not address much of the real stress of parenthood and early child care. I know one Ivy League university that is affiliated with an exemplary child-care program that costs between $17,000 and $19,000 a year. When I asked a friend how the university could imagine its faculty and staff members could afford it, she smiled sourly: “Whether you are man or woman, you’d better marry a venture capitalist. A successful venture capitalist.”
What improvisations are we prepared to make? In my department, working with a sympathetic and creative dean and provost, I have been able to structure ad hoc “solutions” so that women and men who have faced personal joys like pregnancy and personal tragedies like lingering illnesses or deaths have not also been flung out upon the tender mercies of the family-leave act. (Our bereavement leave is only 10 working days. Tell that to a parent who has lost a child.)
If I had not thought to ask, or known the university well enough to navigate it, I have no idea whether those solutions would have been found. I do know that, in the current academic landscape, they take an inordinate amount of time, energy, and management to pull off. Each “case” has to be negotiated individually. To some extent, we can step in and volunteer to cover for each other’s classes, but there are limits -- a historian of the United States could not cover more than an emergency session of, say, a course in the history of China. And few of our “solutions” are entitlements written into our packages of benefits, the costs shared throughout the university.
Moreover, structural changes, difficult though they are, are easier to make than cultural changes. Thus parental-leave policies that extend the tenure clock do not eliminate grumbling -- “She had eight or nine years; I only had seven.” They do not alter unexamined, even unconscious measures of what counts as appropriate work. Both men and women are resented when they plead child care (although men seem to be resented less). Joan Williams, whose book about the workplace -- Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000) -- ought to be required reading for us all, reports that men still fear asking universities for the parental leave to which they are entitled, lest they find their future careers undermined.
Some years ago a policy was floated at my university: When we employed both spouses of an academic couple, and extended the tenure clock for the woman, we proposed extending it for her partner as well, on the ground that we would in that way convey both expectation of and support for both parents’ engagement in child care. The idea was dropped when virtually everyone who seriously considered it concluded that men would use the time not for child raising but for scholarship, thus upping the ante for tenure instead of leveling the playing field.
As though it were a new one, another idea is now being increasingly raised -- most recently by David Brooks in January in The New York Times. He proposed that the answer to the stress and, especially, the risks of delaying childbearing is for women to delay their careers instead, spending the first 10 years or so after college in jobs that can easily be meshed with child care, and only entering graduate school after their children are in school. That vision is the familiar advice of the 1940s and 1950s. A whole generation took it. Many found that the marriages that were supposed to provide love, honor, and support might turn out to be unpredictable, and that they might find themselves self-supporting long before they had expected. They also found that they lived in a society in which age matters, and in which they were at a grave disadvantage in the job market against men with similar training who were 10 years younger, or men who were their own age but with 10 years more expertise. In some rapidly changing fields -- not all of them the sciences -- they also found their undergraduate knowledge or their graduate degrees hopelessly outdated. Why replicate a failed strategy?
W hat are the changes we need for a more equitable workplace?xxxxx Flexibility. I am hearing of workplaces that are increasingly skeptical of commuter couples who live in different areas, because the traveling spouse is not on the campus every day; departments take it as disloyalty. We need to clarify work expectations so that people who meet their responsibilities are not expected to be in their offices 9 to 5.
Flexibility. Let us reimagine what counts as “full time.” What about making eight years at three-quarters time equal to six years at full time? And can we rearrange teaching schedules -- three courses in one semester, one in another? Can we allow -- as the sociologist Jennifer Glass suggested five years ago in an article in Contemporary Sociology -- for partners who are both employed by a university to have four-day workweeks in overlapping clusters: Monday-Thursday; Wednesday-Saturday, leaving only two days when neither partner can be even partially available for care?
Flexibility. Even during these crisis years in the humanities, financing for humanities research has actually increased. But that increase has largely taken place in the form of site-based fellowships -- at research libraries, institutes for advanced study. Sometimes those institutions are absolutely the right place for scholars, because of the invigorating mix of new colleagues and the availability of documentary research materials. But taking such fellowships also requires moving, which can gravely disrupt family life and pull children out of school and after-school networks. The fellowships may be especially disruptive in two-career families. They place disproportionate burdens on family resources, which may well mean putting people who are not surrounded by middle-class-family support at a disadvantage: They are especially difficult for single parents and academics from the working class to embrace. We need to ensure robust growth in the numbers of portable fellowships, so that shifting from teaching to research does not require shifting the entire context of our personal and family lives.
Flexibility. Does our vision of who is likely to be an innovative and resilient colleague include people who have much to learn about the implicit and often impenetrable cultures of academic life? People who were the first in their family to go to college, often people of color? Do we not need to function as our own anthropologists, decoding and demystifying the strange communities of practice that we have built over the years so that people from a wide variety of backgrounds can join in the work of expanding our knowledge? Orientation to professional life is something that departments and colleges could sponsor -- it would benefit everyone.
As feminists we have long been creative about devising and sustaining equality in the household. We’re still working on it, but the changes in a generation have been remarkable. It is time to turn our attention to creating equitable workplaces and to widening the range of choices that we, and all our colleagues, can make in them.
That will take real imagination, and it will cost real money. The changes we sought in the 1970s asked for fairness. Most cost little except to the egos of people who had enjoyed protection from competition from women. Some were and continue to be financially expensive and worth it: efforts to rectify poor education for children of racial and ethnic minorities, to finance their education, to recruit them to the academy, to sustain them when they are here. What we now seek will also require originality, cleverness, and money.
If we are going to reconfigure our universities so that men as well as women will be able to meet the challenges of human life, we are in desperate need of social scientists who understand the social and economic relations within their own academic institutions; who understand that choices about what “fringe” benefits cover are themselves socially constructed. “Choices” about 80-hour weeks, whether free or coerced, actually follow choices that the institution has already made about the configuration of the work that it sustains. We need economists who will not dismiss criticism as coming from “activists whose sensibilities might be at odds with intellectual debate” (as one Harvard economist complained to a Boston Globe reporter in the wake of the Summers controversy), but rather bring their expertise about race and gender stratification in the workplace squarely to the necessary work of reconfiguring the academic institutions in which they live.
The special pleasure of academic life is that, if we are lucky, we will do what we love and get paid for it. All workers develop some aspects of their identities from their work; we are a subset of workers whose identities are especially likely to be linked to our work. Breathing the joys of this life, it is easy for us to ignore the large trends of the late-20th-century American workplace, among them the expansion of the number of hours in the workday for managers and professionals (that’s us). Breathing the joys of our work, we can all too easily allow confusion between the institution as site of research and creativity and the institution as employer. Whether we are poets or physicists, biologists or historians, we are also adults who Glass says are being “materially and socially rewarded by concentrating their energy and efforts on achievement in the labor market rather than childbearing and community building.”
As we reconsider the characteristics of the equitable academic workplace, let us not be apologetic. Some of what we claim is in the name of convenience and accessibility. But we have a larger vision: to reclaim the academic workplace as a locale for a full and humane life, for contemplation and meditation. People who do good work over the full expanse of their careers should be whole human beings, part of the world’s tragedies and comedies.
We live in an important moment in the social history of higher education in the United States. It may be as significant a moment as 1920, when for the first time the number of female college students approximated the numbers of men (although in institutional structures severely segregated by race and sex). It may be as invigorating a moment as the one we lived in 35 years ago, now that a critical mass of smart women who have earned advanced degrees and set out to develop academic careers are stumbling over a set of roadblocks that they had not anticipated.
We may be seeing -- I hope we are -- a confluence of energies directed at reconstructing equitable academic workplaces, at making the academy a safe place for ambitious women and the ambitious partners who love them. The American Council on Education’s recent report calls upon leaders of higher education to “proactively address the institutional climate that governs the career cycle of faculty.” Taken together with other findings -- like those published in Academe or commissioned by learned societies like the American Historical Association, whose Committee on Women Historians will issue a report later this year, and the steady journalism in newspapers like The Chronicle -- we are preparing to set a new agenda and to put it into practice.
Many years ago the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an essay, “Women and the Alphabet,” in which he made the point that if you didn’t like uppity women the place to start was at the beginning. Once you teach girls the alphabet they’ll want to read, once they read they’ll get ideas, once they get ideas they’ll make claims. Once Harvard decided to educate female students, it should not have been surprised that the institution would face questions about the social arrangements in which scholarship takes place. Women have been earning Ph.D.'s in the academy in equal numbers to men for more than a decade. Why be surprised that we now demand that workplaces be user-friendly to us -- and to all?
Why not think about how all of us, men and women, tenured and untenured, staff or faculty members, whatever social and financial resources we have or have not inherited, stand to gain from more-equitable workplaces?
Linda K. Kerber is chair of the department of history and a lecturer in law at the University of Iowa. She is president-elect of the American Historical Association.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 28, Page B6