Mama, PhD Contributor on the Radio
July 17th, 2007 Leslie Fields will be on the radio this week discussing the hard realities of being pregnant when you don’t want to be, at a difficult time in life—on Focus on the Family’s radio and internet broadcast this week, Wednesday and Thursday (July 18,19). The program is called “Hope in the Midst of Unexpected Pregnancy,†and is based on Fields’ book Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy. Panelists include Fields and others who speak about the ways they found strength and hope to carry and birth their babies, despite our circumstances.
You can find a station that broadcasts FOF by going to www.family.org and clicking on the box, “daily broadcast†on the left. If you miss the listening dates, the programs will be archived on their site.
Making Academic Life Easier for Families
June 28th, 2007American Public Media’s Marketplace program recently ran a program on Higher Education Recruitment Consortiums (HERCs), organizations of schools within a region that share information about job openings, in order to recruit and keep candidates who have a spouse or partner’s career to consider, too. The goal of the regional HERCs (here’s a link to New England’s) is to help keep families together.
We’d love to see the end of the academic commuter marriage; tell us, Mama PhDs, have you used an HERC?
Make Your Voice Heard!
June 7th, 2007Suniya Luthar, Professor of Clinical and Developmental Psychology Columbia University’s Teachers College, is gathering responses to a survey of Moms as People. Take some time to reflect on your experience and convey how this work affects your life. You can find the survey here.
New Book on Combining Work & Family
June 3rd, 2007Mary Ann Mason, until recently the graduate dean at U.C. Berkeley, and her daughter, Eve Mason Ekman, a social worker, have published a new book titled Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers (Oxford University Press).
Mason made news several years ago with her studies on women in the academy titled “Do Babies Matter?” This project expands on that, looking at the impact of family life on women’s careers in medicine, law, business, and higher education and, most importantly, offering suggestions to make combining work and family easier.
I’m looking forward to checking it out…
More Good News
April 25th, 2007I love posting these updates! Check out the article in today’s Inside Higher Education with its wrap-up of changes at the University of Kentucky, Kenyon College, Standford, Princeton and Yale to make those schools more family-friendly for graduate students and faculty.
Good news for Berkeley Graduate Students!
April 13th, 2007Berkeley’s Dean Mary Ann Mason is at the forefront in making the university a more family-friendly place, and we’re glad to read of this great new benefit for UCB graduate students. I hope that soon graduate students throughout the U.C. system can enjoy a paid maternity leave.
Women doctoral students at Berkeley who hold fellowships or academic appointments as graduate-student instructors or researchers will soon be eligible for six weeks’ paid maternity leave under a childbirth-accommodation provision passed March 5 by the Graduate Council. The policy, which takes effect in fall 2007, builds on the campus’s suite of family-accommodation measures for faculty — such as teaching-duty relief and tenure-clock stoppage for faculty parents of young children — by “pushing it down to the doctoral-student level,” says Graduate Dean Mary Ann Mason.
By Cathy Cockrell, Public Affairs
Good News for Graduate Students
April 7th, 2007Princeton University has just announced a new package of benefits designed to make family life easier on their graduate students. The benefits include 3 months of paid maternity leave (along with extensions of academic fellowships and deadlines); child care support; additional funds to pay for childcare; and even mortgage assistance.
Let’s hope other schools quickly follow Princeton’s lead!
Bring the Kids!
March 20th, 2007OK, so you’re a mama, and you’re in graduate school, or maybe you’re a professor, and you’re managing, with an intricate system of childcare arrangements, to teach, to research, and mother your child. As long as no one gets sick, and no one reschedules a meeting at the last minute, and no one’s car breaks down, you manage to meet your professional and personal obligations. When you’re at home, it all works.
But what about when you have to attend a conference? What do you do? What if your child’s still nursing or just too young to leave at home, or you can’t cobble enough childcare to leave your older child? Wouldn’t it be great if you could bring your child, knowing that quality childcare is provided at the conference site?
Of course it would be, and for those attending the Association of Jewish Studies annual conference, it is! Read more about it in Mama, Ph.D. contributor, Megan Pincus Kajitani’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
MomsRising and the New York Times
February 23rd, 2007Academic mothers aren’t the only working mothers with needs.
The second-most e-mailed article on the New York Times online today is about MomsRising, an advocacy group for mothers. If you stop by the blog on the MomsRising website, you’ll also see an article written by Caroline about screening the MomsRising documentary (her review of the film is here at LiteraryMama). Take a moment and read these articles, and then pop over to the MomsRising homepage to see what you can to do help.
If you’ve arrived here from the MomsRising website and wish to know more about our book, Mama PhD, start with About the Book, and then take a look at our Table of Contents and Submission Guidelines.
Behind the Scenes
January 20th, 2007The Mama, Ph.D. book proposal is now off Elrena’s and my desks and making its way to the desks of several publishers. Soon we will turn our attention back to the terrific submissions we received, and be in touch with contributors about their essays.
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