“To publish or parent?” should never be the question. The disjunctive conjunction or indicates that propositions of being a mother and professor cannot coexist. Despite the change over time in women’s receipt of PhDs and academia’s gender profile, society continues to perpetuate gendered norms of productivity and the mythical notion of work-life balance—both of which endlessly complicate the conceptualization and operationalization of the female academic’s success. Amplifying the voices of other mother scholars’ oral histories and weaving them with reflections of personal journeys, this study posits a reflective checklist that prompts female academics to make choices, give priority and engage in both worlds to the best of their ability with their own concepts and measures of success. Women cannot give in to this concept of two separate worlds, which splinters the self. We are not mothers and scholars, we are MotherScholars. It is important for women in academia to claim our entire personhood, professional and parent, if we are to seek freedom from feeling torn between these spheres.
“To publish or parent?” should never be the question. The disjunctive conjunction or indicates that propositions of being a mother and professor cannot coexist. While women in academia clearly forge and are shaped by experiences on different paths, it is all too evident that in contrast to their male counterparts a concurrence of inequitable challenges exist (Curtis, 2011; Williams, 2010, 2015; Vendantam, 2011).
Still too often cloaked and undiscussed, the challenges associated with the female academic’s pursuit to navigate the normative— but mythical—work-life balance frequently yield gendered isolation and quandaries of perceived efficacy. As one fellow participant at a recent women’s conference proclaimed, “the norm is not a norm! We wouldn’t be discussing issues about academia and parenting if we were attending a men’s conference!” Another attendee, who identified as a doctoral student, mother and wife, shared that “she felt so alone in her doctoral studies.” Across our gatherings with women at conferences, within offices, classrooms and hallways, faculty and graduate students were united in their inquiry as to how to simultaneously operate across domestic and academic spheres successfully.
Citing research and serving as a conjunction for the oral histories of women with varied identities—leader, researcher, wife, partner, mom, caregiver, advisor, teacher, and mentor—along different points of the career continuum, this study was guided by the overarching questions: (1) How is success for women perceived, conceptualized, and operationalized within the framework of work and family in academia? (2) What are viewed as the systemic faults of academia that affect women unjustly? And (3) How do those interviewed define success and want it to be measured?
Theoretical Framework
Theoretical and empirical studies illuminate the gendered, normative obstacles women in academia continue to face in the 21st century. Academia’s traditional model of separate spheres of work and life perpetuates socially constructed expectations about gender roles (Drago, 2007). Drago asserts that career choice is controlled by three American cultural norms: the motherhood norm, the ideal worker norm, and the individualism norm (p. 7). Joan Williams (2010, 2015) cites that these three norms coupled with academia’s lack of support for working mothers reinforce the “maternal wall” or “maternal glass ceiling.” While women have overtaken men in their receipt of doctorates (Okahana & Zhou, 2018), the leaking of females from the academic pipeline is affected “far more by discrimination than by any innate differences between men and women” (Vendantam, 2011). In fact, many female doctoral students are dissuaded from pursuing a career in academia because the “timing and requirements of tenure make it so hard to raise families” (Marcus, 2007, p. 28). Whether biased messaging be conscious or unconscious, a female academic’s choices are not always self-determined or without repercussions (Vendantam, 2011). While it is insinuated that women choose the motherhood role over the ideal worker norm or elect to study disciplines that do not pay as much, research shows that women’s’ academic paths are instead overwhelmingly dictated by horizontal gender discrimination at job placement (Weisshaar, 2017) and “limited career options, socially gendered roles on the job and in the home, and by ‘ simple’ economics” (Curtis, 2011, p. 7). Gendered roles, gender-biased perceptions of competence, and inequities in terms of pay continue to permeate academia.
In the publication Publish and Perish? An Assessment of Gender Gaps in Promotion to Tenure in Academia, Weisshaar (2017) asserts that neoclassical economic theories of human capital and meritocracy, which propose that rewards such as pay and promotion be tied to productivity, could be at play in female academics’ tenure evaluation and promotion. However, gendered differences in productivity — measured by academia in the form of publications, research, grants, et cetera— should be less attributed to competence than to “factors such as mentoring, service loads, and gendered divisions of labor in the household can lead to gendered differences in opportunities and preferences, which in turn can affect performance (West et al., 2013)” (Weisshaar, 2017, p. 533). These factors explain in large part why women remain underrepresented as and with less resources than full professors at doctoral universities, at the full professor rank, and within the country’s highest-paying research universities (Curtis et al., 2019).
Interaction between the demands of work and home put female academics at a disproportionate disadvantage. Surveying scientists at nine selective research universities, Fox and colleagues (2011) researched the perceived bilateral conflict between work and family/ household based on gender. They found that women reported higher levels of conflict of family/household with work than males (2.76 versus 2.35 on a 4-point scale; p. 724). They also reported that “Among women scientists, holding a senior academic rank increases the probability of family interfering with work (log odds .53, p < .10), while among men, senior rank has no effect” (p. 724). Research shows that men benefit more from work-life interaction. This is illustrated in Juraqulova et al.’s (2019) research of U.S. PhD-granting economics departments that found men to benefit more from parenting policies and services such on-site childcare. Similarly, “stop the tenure clock” (Mason et al., 2013) policies meant to assist tenure-track faculty with childbirth and rearing may in turn “exacerbate gender inequality, since evaluators have difficulty adjusting productivity expectations for the stopped tenure clock (Lundquist et al., 2012; Manchester et al., 2010)” (Weisshaar, 2017, p. 534). For example, Antecol et al. (2018) report that gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies reduce female tenure rates and increase male tenure rates at research-intensive economics departments.
Indeed, in practice, academia fosters a stigma against caregiving by perpetuating and creating traditional stereotypes in which academic mothers are advised to take on less work and travel, or in which the assumption is made that an academic mother’s tardiness to work is due to caregiving while an academic father’s is due to research (Curtis, 2011). This, in turn, leads women to engage in “bias avoidance” behaviors such as hiding family obligations or not taking family or maternity leave (Drago et al., 2005). Lundquist et al. (2012) found that only 26% of female STEM faculty took leave. And for just reason perhaps given Manchester et al.’s (2013) research that found that faculty who did take leave at a Midwestern research university were paid less. For reasons such as these, which illuminate the academic land mine of gender discrimination, female academics are more likely than men to delay or not have children (Mason & Goulden 2004).
Conceptual Framework
Both researchers participate in this inquiry as mother and scholar or professor and mom, also referred to as Motherscholar or ProfessorMom. The primary researcher is a mom to three children (college daughter, high school son, and middle school son), spouse to a community college professor, a full professor, and a department chair. She entered her academic career, upon completing her PhD, married with a 13-month-old and had two additional children during the tenure process. The secondary researcher is a mother to three children, adjunct faculty, a doctoral candidate, a spouse to an academic administrator, and a sandwich generation caregiver.
We find that while research has sought to name and quantify the forces of gravity working against the MotherScholar’s ascent, few studies approach the measures by which success is conceptualized and operationalized using the lens of self-determination. If academia is to systematically change, we argue that women should be in charge of, or at least part of the team, constructing the rulers with which their success will be measured. Employing a pragmatic, field research approach, we seek to understand how the women with whom we spoke conceptualize and operationalize success as well as to intercede by flipping the normative script with recommendations attending to how to initiate greater determination of their success.
Methods
We conducted unstructured interviews of women in academia over a full-year cycle with the purpose of theoretical saturation, employing an oral history research methodology. We engaged in interviews in university offices, virtually and by telephone, and at professional and academic conferences. Consent was garnered for participants with a range of ages, experience and identity referents, including anticipated mother, mother, sandwich generation caregiver; graduate student, adjunct professor, lecturer, assistant professor, professor, professor emerita, academic leader; White, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Asian. Interviews were guided by sensitizing questions informed by the researcher’s theoretical framework— narratives of career choice and gender roles, productivity, the bilateral conflict between work and home, and stigma against caregiving —in pursuit of how the female academic perceived, conceptualized and operationalized success.
To control for bias and assumptions, we employed a constant comparison approach to data analysis. We then grouped data into conceptual labels, which were reevaluated, regrouped and renamed as sensitivities to meanings became clearer with further analysis. Concepts were then systematically compared with the purpose of theory generation. All interpretations were considered provisional until supported or verified by participants (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Lastly, we employed the flip-flopping technique, “turning a concept inside out or upside down to obtain a different perspective” (p. 97), and analyzed discrepant cases in pursuit of providing steps for action to change the academic landscape.
Findings
Success is a noun; an often all-encompassing and overwhelming term serving to capture one’s worth or value in academia. The Oxford Dictionary defines success as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” This clearly indicates that it is not one size fits all. Speaking with the female academics in our study, we sought to better understand how success for them was perceived, conceptualized, and operationalized within the framework of work and family in academia.
Conceptualization of Success
The participants with whom we spoke communicated feeling the burdensome expectation that success as an academic mother was framed in terms of balance of work and life. Despite the change over time in academia’s gender composition, those interviewed that were on the professor track noted how societal messages continue to perpetuate the anachronistic idea of work-life balance. Suggesting a false demarcation between these two worlds, too many ProfessorMoms felt the heavy normative burden of balancing it all. Underscoring how this mythical normative framework impacts the female academic pipeline, one graduate student, a mother of a middle school student and infant questioned, “Professor, how do you do it all and do it well? How do you be a good mom, wife, and professor?” Another graduate student pointed out how this framework was gendered, remarking “It is always my female faculty talking about work-life balance. I never hear male faculty discussing this issue.” While told balance was something to aspire to, most found it elusive. As one student claimed of their advisor, “It seems like she works all the time. She takes care of her family and students. She never stops. She will answer emails at 11 P.M. and 6 A.M.”
Women cited the feeling that if balance was not to be achieved that the undue choice between parenting and publishing was the foundation on which academic success was conceptualized. The perception that one must make a choice between being a scholar, professor, or a mother to be a tenure-track faculty member was a concern. As one clinical faculty member noted, “I don’t want to sacrifice my children to be a scholar.” This feeling of having to choose between the identities of parent and professor left our study participants feeling bereft. Another graduate student with three children commented:
I find myself apologizing more for feelings of falling short—to my kids, my husband, friends, advisor, professor, and employer— than I do celebrating my accomplishments. It has led me to feel that I am always operating at a deficit. And it is not only disempowering, it is exhausting.
Illustrating the pressure women in academia face in choosing between their identities and roles, one associate professor chose to have a C-section to deliver her child so that she would stay on schedule to get back to work when the term began. Another professor and college leader commented that others’ conceptualization of her success was founded upon the either/or framework of parenting or publishing, relaying, “I’m always taken back that people are so surprised that I have multiple children. People say and ask things like, ‘ Who raises your kids?’ or ‘ It is great that your husband allows you to pursue your professional goals!’”
While study participants often had a collegial team offering support of the idea of family or extending the common courtesy of asking how the family is, family first was identified as an atypical and often stigmatized, path to success in the world of professorship. The following account of one female academic illustrates:
I still recall toward the end of my graduate school career when my husband and I found out that I was pregnant with our first child. There were so many feelings, but one resonates in my memories… the fear of telling my committee that I was pregnant. I believed that many would see my pregnancy as a roadblock to my professional aspirations. I waited and when I shared the news, I heard, “Congratulations or condolences.” This was my first glance into the road that lay and still lay ahead of me in academia.
Citing the systemic faults perpetuating the stigmatization of caregiving in academia, another much younger mother of two preschool-aged children explained that an institutional, paradigmatic shift is necessary to redress the fractured way in which academic mother success is conceptualized. She commented, “In order to succeed, policy must be in place that helps and not hurts faculty. The organization is the issue.”
Feeling stigmatized for the caregiving role and challenged to disjointedly navigate the work-life sphere, those with whom we spoke were overwhelmed by guilt. The judgment of what they were doing, either by themselves, peers, or others seemed to constantly linger. Am I doing enough? Are you going to that college event? How long will it take to get those papers graded? Then there was the other side. Will you be at my concert? Can you help me with my project? What’s for dinner?
Not to go unmentioned, the caregiver role was not always only that of parenting. Participating female faculty and graduate students found themselves taking care of aging parents or ill relatives. A long-time associate professor explained that she felt forced to choose to continue to be a productive researcher or accept her status and accept her new identity as a member of the sandwich generation. She went on to share that, “Raising kids was the easy part. Taking care of my aging parents while adding grandchildren to the mix made me choose family over career.” Generally speaking, success was compartmentalized, almost seen through two lenses - professional and home. Any attempt to blend the two seemed impossible to many and just not worth it to others. It was repeated in many different ways that choices had to be made of where to have success and a reasonable time frame to achieve it.
Operationalization of Success
The women with whom we spoke cited payment in the form of salary or stipend, productivity and promotion, as well as accountability as being the ways in which success is operationalized in academia. Most women providing input were on 9 or 10-month contracts, which should in theory mean they have 2 or 3 months to which they have increased autonomy and choices. Yet, most of these women relayed doing more of the same work over summer months with no fiscal or other compensation. As a midcareer, tenured faculty stated, “So many of us do work in the summer that we are not getting paid to do.” An advanced graduate student, who also had a dual role as adjunct faculty at a community college echoed, “The invisible work in academia is the real issue.” Invisible work referenced by the academic mothers with whom we spoke included mentoring students, community service, grant applications, research assistant supervision, and committee work. These responsibilities were accepted as part of the job.
Many women with whom we spoke communicated an ever-nagging feeling of falling short of these markers of success. While in conversation with other academic mothers at a recent women’s conference, a professor remarked, “I constantly feel guilty, as there are not enough hours in the day to give everything that needs my attention the time it needs. Something has to give—I’m hitting another drive thru for dinner or not getting papers graded.” This compensatory positionality continues to give momentum to the normative myth of balance in which success is rarely achieved as both an academic and a mother.
Participants consistently expressed a need in academic reviews for a measure in which academic success is evaluated and assessed without penalty for parenting or caregiving. Many academic mothers indicated the need for metrics that allow for trajectory success even with stop-outs and inconsistent productivity levels. It was also expressed that the extra work happening “off the clock” during noncontract periods needs to be accounted for or removed. These institutional measures in hand with the academic mother’s own unique operationalization of success were cited by participants as frameworks which need revision to ensure equity and acknowledge the entirety of the MotherScholar’s identity.
Discussion
Merriam-Webster defines balance as the “stability produced by even distribution of weight on each side of the vertical axis.” Demands on productivity within work and life spheres were noted by participants to never be equal and for that reason, work-life balance was suggested to be an absolute myth. Even during the current Coronavirus pandemic, social media is plastered with the scholar mother and professor mom trying to do it all. Instead of incredible support, universities have put their burdens onto faculty, increasing workloads and introducing policies and procedures that limit the ability of moms to care for their children. In turn, women have submitted fewer manuscripts for publication and registered a smaller proportion of research than their male counterparts during the second semester of 2020 (Kitchener, 2020; Viglione, 2020).
Throughout the duration of the study, faculty members and graduate students again and again spoke of gender equity issues. One said, “academia must get over socialization.” Another faculty noted that it was critical to “not be afraid of being the only voice.” Another chimed in, “The burden we carry adds to the stress. Family and parenting should not only be an issue for women in academia.”
What is the solution for women in academia? We must make choices, give priority where we should when we need to and engage in both worlds to the best of our ability. We cannot give in to this concept of two separate worlds, which splinters the self into two separate identities. We are not mothers and scholars, we are MotherScholars. We are not professors and moms, we are ProfessorMoms. It is important to claim our entire personhood, professional and parent, if we seek freedom from feeling torn between these spheres.
Claiming Success
Success can be both conceptualized and operationalized in many ways. It is not linear and many have described it as a moving target in academia. Front and center in academia are two concrete benchmarks that many use as rulers for measuring success—promotion and tenure. Yet, does getting promotion and tenure mean one is successful? And does one have to achieve a certain post at a particular type of institution to attain success? What are these thresholds towards which we are reaching, and who has marked these as such?
It is necessary to take control of our success and to upend the normative framework in which we have too long been operating. How do we individually define success and how do we want it to be measured? When faculty and students in higher education identified what it meant to be successful, the responses were many:
publications and funding”;
being a good teacher and mentor”;
transmitting knowledge”;
impacting society”; and
making a difference in students’ lives.”
The fact is that while each college and university has its definitions and standards, which need to be achieved, women in academia clearly need to develop their own operationalization of success. In order to not feel torn and to feel purpose in navigating through worlds in which success is not clear, academic mothers need to engage in reflection on how to be purpose-driven and create their own directive determinants. It is critical to take control of this word success and not let others determine an individual’s success or worth.
If organizational culture is defined as the norms, values and beliefs of the people who compose it, those within the system need not be constricted to revolutionary structural and systemic change. Women in academia can stir innovation by challenging—not reinforcing— gendered ways of thinking, doing and succeeding through our everyday practice. Speaking of bottom-to-top change in A Modest Manifesto for Shattering the Glass Ceiling, Meyerson and Fletcher (2000) claim that individual efforts over time “may be embraced because they create the impetus for learning and positive change” (p. 135). Whether spurring innovation solo or with like-minded individuals, small wins can be powerful by “upending systemic barriers to progress” (p. 135). Efforts come in forms of naming unquestioned assumptions and practices as well as combining changes in behavior with changes in understanding. And, they can snowball.
Shattering the Glass Ceiling From Above and Below: A Reflective Checklist
Women need to be the architects of the academia we want and leaders of small wins to advance normative and structural change. What does it mean to be a leader? It could mean that you are an advocate for yourself and others at all points in your career. Maybe you are the one that is willing to challenge or rewrite the family support and leave policy. Maybe you are the voice of reason when meetings are in conflict with school schedules. Maybe you are the one that says no, because honestly, everyone knows that is one of the most difficult words in academia to speak. Still the looming question is what you do once in an official position of leadership. A department chair shares:
While climbing the academic ladder, I kept a journal of inequities and injustices that I was unable to impact the way I wanted. Now, I am able to lead and treat others as I wished people had done for me along the trajectory. Really, when it comes down to it, the most critical component to change is not to replicate bad practice. Put an end to the wrong when given the opportunity.
Whether through identifying gender inequity, coaching, changing hiring and promotion policy, or recognizing the invisible work of the ProfessorMom/MotherScholar, women in official positions of leadership must stimulate and support change for the collective.
Reframing the navigation of the academic ladder is essential, to either shatter the glass ceiling from above or underneath. The critical question women in academia must ask is How to be ok with not being balanced? Emotional, physical, and social wellness is the goal, while meeting standards and achieving success, whatever that is. Through this exploration, a list of questions that female academics should ask themselves surfaced:
What are your professional barriers? Be honest about whom or what is creating these barriers. If you are personally creating them, remove them. Take control.
Do you have the support you need to meet or exceed the professional standards your institution has established? If yes, identify the support—recognize it—utilize it. If no, find it. You may have to go outside of the academy.
What does it mean to you to be successful? Define success. Conceptualize success. Operationalize success. Set attainable and measurable goals in this realm. If you want others to be reasonable and supportive, start with treating yourself that way.
Have you been impacted by gender inequity (intentional or unintentional) in academia? If so, how? Label it. Offer a solution not to let it happen to you again or anyone else. Make this a personal call to action.
How has your institution addressed gender inequity? Identify the positives of the system. These provide a foundation to build the rest of the structure. Figure out who was involved in the change. Identify the catalysts and change-makers.
What needs to be addressed by your institution in regard to gender inequity? Keep a running list. Some things might be microlevel and others macro. Be involved in change as you wish or present the needs to someone else that may give them voice.
What is your professional identity? You establish this. Create what you wish for others to recognize. This may or may not include your personal identity. That is your choice!
What activities support and strengthen the life you want to lead? Give value to these activities and illustrate how they align with the direction you want to take/grow.
To employ this framework, honest answers must be followed with action. With each response, it is imperative that one be intentional and introspective and if needed, reevaluate with a willingness to make adjustments. No one should assume they are the only one that needs to explore these critical questions. Each individual should encourage colleagues, students, and others in academia to complete this exercise. A revolution can start with reflection and recognition. As you do this work, do it with the knowledge that work-life balance is a myth, gender inequities exist, and that the world of academia can change and needs to change.
Conclusion
This study provides a platform for change to happen. Through a synthesis of women’s ideas and stories, the reflective checklist was formed. Women take on many roles in academia and the home including administrator, professor, wife, mom, advisor, teacher, mentor, volunteer and researcher. It is important that women in academia upend antiquated, normative expectations of being and doing, as well as be comfortable with being the only voice to redress inequities. The immediate goal of this work is to debunk the myth of work-life balance as well as to challenge gender equity in academia while demonstrating how women can individually and uniquely operationalize success within the framework of work and family. Here, issues are identified and given names. Questions are raised, and challenges are made. While there is much more work to do, this study produced a framework for critical conversations and the foundation for subsequent research. Voices must continue to be heard. Difficult discussions must continue to be made. This work should impact institutional policy, decisionmaking, career support, and accountability, as no one should have to ponder the question of whether to publish or parent.
