Can Work in Higher Education Be Family Friendly?
January 15th, 2009Doctoral students at the University of California campuses think not, according to a survey released this week by Mary Ann Mason, former dean of the UC Berkeley graduate division and co-author of Mothers on the Fast Track; Marc Goulden, a researcher at the University of California; and Karie Frasch, manager of the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge project.
“The survey [of more than 8300 graduate students] found that 84 percent of women and 74 percent of men are somewhat or very concerned about the family friendliness of their future employers. But only 46 percent of men and only 29 percent of women imagine jobs in research universities to be somewhat or very family friendly.”
Read more about the study at Inside Higher Ed.
NWSA 2009: Call for Roundtable Participants
January 13th, 2009Mama, PhD:
Reflections on Parenting in the (Feminist) Academy
The 2008 book, Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life, offers a diverse set of perspectives on the challenges and rewards of combining parenthood with an
academic career. This proposal seeks to continue that conversation, particularly focusing on the experience of parenting as Women’s Studies (and WS-related) faculty and graduate
students. Despite the popular perception of academia as a flexible career that easily accommodates parenthood (“You only teach 12 hours a week? And you have summers off?”), the demands of publishing, teaching, dissertation writing, attending conferences, going on the job market, and activism make navigating the work/family divide difficult.
The session will consist of a discussion among panelists, as well as audience members, about various aspects of academic parenting. Topics to be covered may include, but are not limited to:
-planning: when is the best time?
-pregnancy
-working with reproductive technologies
-affording children on grad school stipends and temporary
position pay
-issues with medical benefits
-feminist parenting
-struggles with conception
-attitudes toward parenting in departments and universities
-birthing
-parenting while on the tenure track
-parenting after tenure
-parenting during graduate school
-parenting as an undergraduate
-parenting on the job market
-parenting as a non-traditional student
-adoption
-remaining childfree
-single parenting
-issues in co-parenting
Embedded within our discussion will be an attentiveness to the
ways in which all of these issues are impacted by gender, race, class,
sexuality, age, and ability. Ideally,
participants will include an assortment of individuals who can speak to the
challenges and rewards of parenting at different levels of an academic
career.
Please send a short paragraph describing your proposed
contribution to the roundtable to brown.2997ATosuDOTedu
by February 1st. Decisions will be made by February 5th.
Adriane Brown, PhD Student,
Women’s Studies
The Ohio State University
Top 100 Gender Studies Blogs
January 13th, 2009Mama, PhD has been listed as one of the Top 100 Gender Studies blogs in a terrific list of resources:
Whether you’re pursuing a degree from a top-tier college in women’s studies or taking a few online courses to slowly work towards a degree focused on gender, you can find a number of great blogs online that can supplement your learning experience. Here are a few that we’ve put together that deal with a large range of gender related issues. Here you’ll find blogs that range from defining what it means to be feminine or masculine to understanding your rights under law concerning gender and sexual orientation.
Review at Girl w/Pen!
January 10th, 2009Deborah Siegel’s blog, Girl w/Pen, is one of the smartest ones out there; she and her co-editors produce smart, sharp, feminist commentary on current events, politics and pop culture. So we’re especially proud today to be reviewed there by Elline Lipkin. Here’s an excerpt:
“The contributors in this book, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans, break the seal of silence that suppresses the intense difficulties and institutionalized prejudice that academics who want to be more than just a “head on a stick” – but rather a whole person, including a maternal body – experience. And the pressures that result for women as their likely prime childbearing years meet squarely with the ticking of the tenure clock is intense. The book’s contributors, from a range of academic fields and even generations, outline in often poignant and sometimes excruciating detail how they are forced to choose between career and family, or find creative, often exhausting, and most likely just plain lucky ways to tie the two together.”
Mama, PhD at the MLA!
January 6th, 2009
Usually, graduate students and professors in the humanities tend to dread the annual Modern Language Association convention. After all, it meets right between Christmas and New Year’s, usually in a very cold city, and everybody’s fretting about giving a terrific paper or speaking brilliantly in an interview.
For me, however, now that I am an academic outsider, it was all pretty fun. I got to visit with old friends from graduate school, attend whatever panels I chose (mostly meta-panels on the state of the profession, but one excellent Russian film panel, too), and hang out at the Rutgers and Inside Higher Ed booths, too. In return for a press pass, I wrote a few articles about the proceedings for Inside Higher Ed. MLA Realities: Then and Now; The Quest for Balance and Support; and Caring for Children and Their Parents. Check them out and leave a comment if you like; I’m curious to know how other academic conferences handle child care, and what other fields are doing to make life easier for their grad student and faculty parents.
Mama, PhD review in Bitch magazine
January 6th, 2009The new issue of Bitch has a terrific review of Mama, PhD by Katura Reynolds. Here’s an excerpt:
“While the overall story arcs are sometimes similar, each writer beautifully articulates the personal details of her own experiences. Some of these moments are startlingly beautiful and surprising: Jennifer Eyre White describes how, when catching a moment to breastfeed her baby, she realizes that “one of the beautiful things about being a female engineer is that the [women’s] bathrooms are always empty and peaceful.” Angelica Duran evokes the excitement of her toddler’s motiation to learn his numbers and letters so that he can help operate the keypad that moves the compact-storage shelves of the rare book library. Leslie Leyland Fields recounts the intense fear of professional rejection when, in front of a conference hall full of hundreds of people, she answers the question, “How do you stay grounded?” by revealing, “I have six children.”
~~
“For those who are not on the professor/mommy path, the punchy, short essays are nonetheless interesting reads. Outcasts are torn between fitting in and dropping out. Outsiders defiantly dispel unhelpful myths. Women contemplate the achievements of their mothers while worrying about how their choices will shape the lives of their daughters. The elite are brought down a notch, but find themselves a little more savvy as a result.”
Look for Bitch at your favorite bookstore or newstand to read the rest!
New Review from Mommy Track’d
December 16th, 2008Mommy Track’d has reviewed Mama, PhD this week; here’s an excerpt of the piece by Jo Keroes.
The Ivory Ceiling
If ever there was a book with my name on it, the one I should have written, this is it: Mama PhD, edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. Full disclosure. I’ve been an academic all my professional life. I began working toward my PhD when my kids were young and I was teaching at a university part time. I still get the guilt–chills recalling the classes I should have skipped but didn’t, the times I sent a child to school with a hacking cold instead of staying home with her as I knew I should have. I can summon a cold sweat all these years later if I allow myself to remember getting the call that my daughter had broken her arm sailing off a piece of gymnastic equipment and wondering whether I could finish teaching my class and still get to the emergency room on time instead of bolting out the door that very minute. These are the crises that haunt all working mothers, no matter what their jobs. But while it’s old news that corporations aren’t always kind to working mothers – everyone knows that – what gets less attention is the plight of academic women with young children.
Click on over to Mommy Track’d to read the rest!
Caution: Women at Work
December 10th, 2008
Plan to attend St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s Tenth Annual Women Studies Colloquium, which will include a reading by Mama, PhD contributors Jennifer Cognard-Black, Della Fenster, and Elisabeth Gruner (Tuesday, March 24, 8:00 P. M.). For more information, visit their website.
Seeking Input on “Engaged Scholarship”
December 1st, 2008Our good friend Girl w/Pen wants to hear from you! From her blog today:
At the gracious invitation of the wonderful and savvy Renee Cramer (see her prescient GWP post, “This Bridge Called Barack”, from February), I am giving a workshop at Drake University on Friday on the topic of being an engaged scholar. Engaged, as in, with a public outside of the academy. As always, I’m encouraging folks to try to FRAME issues in public debate rather than simply react when others do the framing for us, and rely on shoddy evidence to support their claims.
And so I thought I’d ask GWP readers who have had experiences “crossing over” from a more academically-inclined universe to more “pop” or public writing and speaking.
- What have you learned from your experience circulating in a more public realm?
- Any advice to other scholars who wish to do the same?
And if you have not (YET!) done some of that crossover activity but want to, what holds you back? Please tell me, in comments.
Click on over to Girl w/Pen to give your response.
Survey of Academic Mom Bloggers
November 25th, 2008There is still time to participate in the survey of academic mom bloggers being conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut Psychology Department, so make your voice heard!. “We will be closing the survey to participants in about 2 weeks, and want to give everyone who was interested in participating a chance. Because the community of academic mothers who blog is relatively small, it is important for us to get as many people to fill out the survey as possible. The survey does require a time commitment of about an hour. If you do not have an hour, but do a have a few minutes, please feel free to complete as much of the survey as possible. You do not have to answer every question, although we are very interested in what you have to say about your own experiences as a mother, academic, and blogger. If you think you may have time to fill it out in more than 2 weeks, please let me know. We hope you”ll consider participating!
Here is the link:
http://www.psychsurveys.org/abfox/blogging
We hope to have preliminary results sometime in March and will happily forward those results to people who have expressed interest. “
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