We need to talk: gender, bias and best practices for supporting academic parents
Kerry F. Crawford and Leah Windsor
The academic profession has a chutes (snakes) and ladders problem and we need to talk about it openly and unflinchingly. The ‘leaky pipeline’ is a well-worn metaphor for the factors that drive women out of academia at higher rates than men. In our forthcoming book, we describe the promise and pitfalls of the academic career trajectory differently: the path from graduate school to the rank of full professor is not linear. Instead, it is punctuated by sudden interruptions, winding detours and career-changing successes. Different sets of rules govern the game, and these rules are rigged in a way that disadvantages women scholars, first-generation scholars, and scholars from marginalized groups. Our focus in this blogpost is on the daily decisions, obstacles and challenges that come along with growing a family, which are disproportionately shouldered by women. Retaining, promoting and supporting women scholars should be a key priority for universities, as juggling family and work commitments is professional behaviour, and supportive policies can make our profession more humane.
The chutes and ladders
The gender gap in academia demonstrates the severity of this problem and women’s unequal career advancement subsidizes the inadequate family formation policies in departments and institutions. The effects of infertility, prenatal care appointments, adoption processes, childbirth, miscarriage, snow days, sick days, the mind-numbing sleep-deprivation of infancy and early childhood, and the misalignment of university and local school or daycare holidays compound over time. Academic parents also rarely experience only one of these interruptions, they generally cascade and amplify each other’s consequences along the way, and women are excessively impacted by this. Very little of this lost time is factored into the support policies for new parents — to the extent that such policies exist on campuses — and over the course of a career each of these bumps in the path potentially opens a ‘chute’ that threatens to slow or stall progress.
Conversely, many of the ‘ladders’ that help to elevate one’s rank and status are inaccessible to women due to their disproportionate share of the caring responsibilities. Co-authorships that begin over drinks at the conference hotel bar exclude pregnant or lactating women or parents travelling with young children. Prestigious residential fellowships that require relocation are difficult or impossible for academics with partners working outside of the home, children in schools, or other family-related anchors. Talks and dinners scheduled in afternoons or evenings provide valuable opportunities for networking and mentorship, but create logistical and financial hurdles for parents who must arrange for after-hours childcare. The move to online teaching and meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic has also disproportionately harmed women, who tend to take on a bigger share of household and childcare duties under normal circumstances and are submitting far fewer papers to academic journals during the pandemic.
Where do we go from here: closing the chutes and making the ladders accessible
That said, it is possible to be a woman, a parent and have a successful academic career. We are both mothers of young children and we have persisted, due in large part to support we have received from mentorship networks, colleagues and each other. We have written elsewhere about best practices for normalizing parents in the academic profession.
Here we suggest several best practices for creating a more humane academic profession and work toward gender parity in publications and faculty ranks. We base these recommendations on our our firsthand experience in the trenches of academic parenthood and the findings from an online survey to our networks of political scientists, International Relations scholars, and academic mothers using social media and listservs. Over the course of two years we received more than 300 complete responses, an astounding result for a 100-question survey. An overarching theme emerged from our respondents’ narratives: parenting in the academy is hard and support systems are lacking. To the extent that policies exist, they are rarely universal, transparent or equitably applied. Policies or practices that do exist tend to disadvantage women and create further advantages for men.
1) Departments and campuses must establish new and/or enforce existing parental leave policies that are universal, transparent, clearly communicated and equitably applied.
Parental leave on the birth or adoption of a child provides the most basic support for parents and families. In the United States, where we work and live, new parents may pursue up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. This is grossly inadequate and often economically perilous. Improved support is especially important for contingent faculty and graduate students, who are often left out of parental leave policies and accommodations provided to faculty who hold more secure positions.
2) Parents must use parental leave to parent.
Parental leave is not a vacation or a sabbatical. Mothers and fathers should use it for caring for a newborn or newly adopted child, recovering for the physical and emotional effects of childbirth and adjusting to life as a larger family. This means it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with research, teaching and service tasks. Accounts of men going on the job market during their parental leave or using the ‘time off’ to publish research and attend conferences suggest that, without accountability measures, universal parental leave stands to deepen the gender inequalities that already exist within academia. This means that ensuring accountability for parental leave use is imperative. No one on parental leave should be expected to continue or increase their research productivity and departments should not reward faculty who misuse their leave time. Similarly, parental leave is not an ‘extra year on the clock’.
3) Accommodations are key to inclusivity and accessibility
Workshops, invited talks and academic conferences should include accommodations for pregnant and lactating scholars, as well as those travelling with small children. Accommodations range from the simple and cost-free, including setting aside a vacant office for a job candidate’s use, to the logistically complex and costly, such as arranging on-site childcare for an entire conference, but each one helps to make the profession more inclusive and accessible. Professional associations are increasingly offering on-site childcare; faculty search committees may offer blocks of ‘no questions asked’ free time for candidates to express breastmilk, take care of medical needs, or speak with an administrator about potential accommodations for partners; and workshop organizers can set aside private spaces for lactation and connect participants with local childcare options.
4) Solutions must account for systemic inequality and move beyond individual-level ‘hacks’
One size fits all policies cannot account for the many complications that parenthood introduces. Think pieces on strategies for ‘having it all’ abound. There is no shortage of advice on ‘leaning in’. Focusing on what an individual can do to improve their lot within an inequitable system, however, does nothing to plug the chutes and secure the ladders for everyone. If the goal is a more humane profession in which success is attainable for all, regardless of their gender or background, then our focus must be on addressing systemic inequality so that individual-level challenges (remember those snow days, sick days, and sleep-deprived days) no longer derail careers.
5) Better mentorship for all
In an effort to reduce the systemic inequality, the reasons why more women leave the profession and the gender gaps in citations and syllabi, we need to establish better mentorship networks that bring men into the conversations on gender inequality. We need men to be allies in efforts to create a more gender equal profession, to establish and enforce universal, transparent and equitable parental leave policies, and to identify and provide accommodations. In our next blog post, we will engage directly with the notion of MENtorship and including men allies in efforts to promote gender equality in academia.
6) We need to talk about it
Our final suggestion is that we need to discuss gender inequality in our profession and, in particular, the need for better support for parents and families. By ensuring that parents are welcome on campus, at workshops and in professional associations, we can go a long way toward achieving gender parity.
Kerry F. Crawford is an Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University in Virginia. Her research and teaching focuses on International Relations, human security, gender in war and peace, and parenthood in the academy.
Leah Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis and runs the Languages Across Cultures lab. She studies linguistic aspects of political communication in international relations, and gender and bias in family formation in academia.
Together they co-authored the forthcoming book, The PhD Parenthood Trap: Gender, Bias, and the Elusive Work-Family Balance in Academia, published by Georgetown University Press.
This blogpost is part of the ‘Women, Gender and Representation in IR’ series International Affairs is curating as part of the 50:50 in 2020 initiative. If you are interested in engaging with this initiative or want to write a blogpost for this series, please email International Affairs’ Junior Editor Leah de Haan at LdeHaan@chathamhouse.org.
