Comments on: Baby pictures on homepages

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Sat, 23 Oct 2004 01:38:22 +0000

If men have a larger presence in academia, and male academics have a larger presence on the internet, then you’d have to compare proportionally rather than just numerically. I’m not sure which you were doing, but I suspect the latter.

By: binky

binky — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 18:36:14 +0000

As in Kaw’s comment, I’ve seen the gender bias on children in a couple of departments, especially in evaluation of grad students. Women with children are treated as not serious, distracted, and are not encouraged to continue in the program. Men with children get special notice and consideration. I attended one funding meeting in which a colleague actually suggested as a reason to give a teaching assistantship to a particular male grad student that “he has a child to support.” At the same time, a single mother was discussed as having too many irons in the fire. Maddening.

By: Cruella

Cruella — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:31:40 +0000

Seems to me that women wouldn’t put kids piccies into their workspace because we all know that anything which can be used against us will be. Sorry if that sounds depressive/pessimistic. I heard a guy the other week saying women should be paid less to do city jobs because there was a higher risk of them suing for sexist treatment!!

By: kaw

kaw — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 23:19:31 +0000

One of my colleagues is working on a series of vignette and audit studies of the motherhood penalty and fatherhood wage premium. (These phenomenon are pretty well known in the gender inequality literature, but most of the evidence comes from longitudinal survey data that aren’t particularly definitive about causality.) She’s found that, given identical cues about the competence and experience of hypothetical employees, respondents consistently judge mothers to be less competent, assign lower compensation, tolerate much less absenteeism, and are less likely to nominate them for managerial training than single women, fathers, or childless men. So far she’s been limited to undergraduate respondents, though she’s working on an audit variant that uses real employers. To the extent that this phenomenon carries over to the real world, and the wage data suggest it does, disguising parental status may still be very rational for many women. I’ve noticed gender-biased evaluations first hand, in our faculty searches. If we’re talking about a female candidate, inevitably one of the first questions out of someone’s mouth is, “what does her partner do?” (See, we’re so liberal in academic sociology that when we’re making gendered assumptions about career ambitions and “moveability,” we use “partner” rather than “husband”.) The two-body issue comes up for the male candidates, but usually not until after the discussion of the substance and quality of their work. Drives me nuts.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:13:24 +0000

The high status could also tend to mean especially attractive wives, and therefore children, whose pictures reflect well on the husband and father.

By: Carolos Obscuros

Carolos Obscuros — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:45:56 +0000

An alternative or supplementary hypothesis: Academics have high social status, and males with high social status are also highly likely to marry, and hence have kids whose snapshots they can display. Women with high social status are far more unlikely to marry than males. They don’t display snapshots of their kids because they don’t have any kids in the first place.

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:05:20 +0000

Yes, Eszter, I think you’re totally right. Women with kids have to have keep the kids in a closet, while professional dads get to be the proud papas. I remember Tim’s post on the topic, and I agree with him. Everyone should post the baby pictures on their laptops. The problem is that a woman professional with kids is seen as less capable. Her first priority must be the kids, so there is no way she can get the work done. It’s assumed that that dads have a stay at home mother to take care of sick days from school and such. Their work won’t be impeded by the rugrats. Also, there is the widespread assumption that moms are stupid and preoccupied with potty changing and Oprah. Have a kid and your IQ drops by 40 points.

By: P O'Neill

P O'Neill — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:05:08 +0000

One theory I’ve heard is that male professors use the kid pictures as a signal that they are NOT single, because they think college administrators are concerned about the risk of prof-student relationships with single professors.

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:58:47 +0000

In a completely random survey of every one of the current homepages of the 44 members of my major at my alma mater (U.Penn, English Dept.) I found that of the 24 men and 20 women, only two had family pictures—both were men. One was a family group shot with no young children present or relationships described. The other was the former head of the Department (he was head when I was there) and had the most extensive webpage of any member of the faculty on a whole range of issues. It shows him with 2 young children. I wonder how much of this is self-censorship versus actual prejudice. I guess you would have to see if percent of women with pictures of children increase after the women get tenure. (While controlling for the fact that the percent of women with children—photographed or not—likely increases after tenure.)

By: Jeff Cooper

Jeff Cooper — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:57:50 +0000

Are we talking here about academic homepages or about blogs? I’ve been known to post about my son on occasion, complete with occasional pictures. But that’s on my blog. I wouldn’t do it on a school-related homepage. And I think I’ve included a picture of him in a Powerpoint class presentation exactly once—the day after he was born.

By: Mary Kay

Mary Kay — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:49:20 +0000

Seems obvious really. The truly interesting study would be who has pictures of their pets and cats or dogs? Or exotics? MKK

By: John Davies

John Davies — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:12:34 +0000

Or could it be that men are more visual? I heard a radio program about women in prison. They said that when the prisoner’s children came to visit, the women kept smelling them. As a guy, that really wouldn’t occur to me.

By: anon

anon — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:14:13 +0000

I once saw a man applying for an academic job show a picture of his family at the end of a slide show, and thought to myself “I wonder if he’s trying to assure the audience that he isn’t gay?”

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:46:39 +0000

I raised this exact issue in an entry last year, along with some general thoughts on Deborah Tannen-type arguments. Short version: yes, I think it’s true that academic men (and professional men more generally) have the privilege to incorporate representations of their family into presentations of their work and not be regarded as unprofessional for it—and that women do not. I was even able to mention the fact that because I had been serving as the primary caregiver for an infant in the second half of my sabbatical, I didn’t get that much done, and not feel self-conscious about it. A female colleague observed that no woman could do that. But my reading of that observation is different than hers. She’d rather no one does it; I’d rather everyone could do it.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:11:05 +0000

Yeah, I think Eszter is basically right about this. A related phenomenon in severe cases is women removing their wedding rings during job-talk visits. (I’ve also heard of women acquiring fake wedding rings before attending particular conferences.)