Should you delay parenthood till tenure?

A friend sent me a link to this Chronicle story about women choosing not to go into academia for family-related reasons. Leiter linked to it last week and invited a discussion (which is very heavily Philosophy-focussed, for obvious reasons) specifically about whether to have children during Graduate School. The men in the thread are generally very positive about starting a family in graduate school, but that is consistent with the findings that there is a correlation between male career success in academia and their having children, whereas the reverse is true for women. My friend also pointed out that many of the men in the discussion have wives who started out in graduate school and left (reasons not usually given).

There’s a follow-up article by Mary Ann Mason today at the Chronicle. She says that:

The number of young women who want to pursue careers in academic research declines by 30 percent over the course of their doctoral study, and the number of men by 20 percent. In explaining their decision, men are more likely to report that they do not like unrelenting work hours. One male student in the survey complained that he was “fed up with the narrow-mindedness of supposedly intelligent people who are largely workaholic and expect others to be so as well.” But most women give up on academic-research careers for family concerns. As one woman in the survey said, “I could not have come to graduate school more motivated to be a research-oriented professor. Now I feel that can only be a career possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children.”

Before commenting, I should say that my own story is (in this respect, as in so many others) entirely privileged. I met my wife just before completing my PhD, and we waited about 5 years before having children, she having become a school teacher in part because the job allows a kind of flexibility for pregnancy and childbearing that many others do not. Although our first child came along 2 years before I got tenure, I already had no doubt that I would get it (having been hired in a department that made tenure requirements very transparent, and which, as far as I can tell, has long treated tenure decisions in a very responsible manner). I pretty quickly came to think (as I still do) that we should have started having kids earlier – something close to regret (though not actual regret, because I can’t get my head around the non-identity issues). So I just haven’t experienced the tensions between career security and parenthood that many people fear, despite being a fully equal parent over the course of my children’s childhoods (As I started this I was minding two children who are just hanging around the house because although their best friend has buggered off somewhere they like to stay here; as I finish I’m looking after a sick 7 year old who is being cooperative only because I have found an almost unlimited supply of The Clitheroe Kid). Additionally, children and family life have become my central research interests, so time spent deliberating about my children counts as work, in some way (I’d recommend more philosophers taking this strategy, but I do realize that not everyone can do it). Some people will think that all this detracts from the value of whatever comments I have, and they may well be right.

So, that said, here my the comments. The first is just to point to Samantha Brennan’s comment in the Leiter thread.

I don’t know if there is a best time but I did well having my first child while in graduate school writing my dissertation. I found that I didn’t have time to socialize with my fellow grad students–no more long lunches, coffees, and late nights–but I was easily able to get 5 hours of writing in a day. As I was on a fellowship I didn’t have any other commitments, no TA responsibilities, so it worked well. I had a very supportive thesis supervisor (Thanks Shelly!) who believed I could do that and that too made a difference. Having a baby during my PhD also meant that I interviewed with baby and partner in tow and hiring departments knew what they were getting. I think this also gave hiring committees the reassurance that I could combine my research with baby care, since I was doing it then. My other two children were born pre-tenure at a Canadian university with excellent daycare and parental leave. It’s also worth noting that I didn’t do this alone. My partner worked only part-time when the children were very young. Mine is the primary career in our house, a luxury most women don’t have. And I have to differ about family friendliness and university careers. Aside from the timing issue–biological clocks and tenure clocks both ticking at once–I’ve found universities to be great places to work while having children. There is the blessing and curse of flexible working hours and at least north of the border great daycare, nursery school, and summer camp programs close to my office. It’s not easy but compared to my women lawyer friends or my friends with are in medicine, comparable jobs in terms of prestige if not income, I think I’ve got a great deal. Anyway, given all of those people who think it’s a bad combo–parenting and an academic career–I just wanted to raise a voice from the other side. Now two academic careers and children…I don’t know but thankfully I haven’t had to deal with that.

(I should note that Brennan’s supervisor is notorious in the profession for the high quality of his supervising, and that Brennan’s post-PhD career has been entirely in Canada, not the US)

I strongly suspect that if you have a child because you really want one, and have substantial support from a spouse or some other person, then while parenting interferes with one’s social life (not always, as I often point out, a downside) it needn’t interfere with your progress in graduate school. Note, though, the antecendents of that conditional.

But another objection to having children is a bit different. More than one person has expressed to me the worry that being visibly pregnant while interviewing for jobs would be a problem. I’m really curious about this. As I was preparing the post I happened to have a meeting with a bunch of senior faculty in the humanities, most of whom are women with kids (because, absurdly, they are less likely to refuse to do this work than other people??). Before the meeting I just asked (because a number of people to whom the question is relevant have asked me) whether they thought that in their disciplines, turning up pregnant to an interview would be a disadvantage. One had actually done this, and said that although she didn’t get the job she thought had nothing to do with the pregnancy. Another echoed Brennan’s comments as follows:

“well, we assume that women are going to have children, and being pregnant shows that they are already confident that they can balance work and parenting”

In other words, it could actually help.

My own thought when the question was first posed to me was rather different. One has almost no information at all about interviewees. But one can assume that there is some non-trivial probability that they are prone to mental health problems, that they will have disruptive experiences in their personal lives, or that other things will derail them, no matter how good they seem. Having children is perfectly normal, and most people in relatively advantaged circumstances seem to manage fine despite having children; it would be nuts to count obvious pregnancy against someone. That it would be nuts is not, of course, a reason to think that no-one does it! But it is a reason to think that it is something that cannot be given as a reason against you in a committee deliberation (even in an all-male committee).

None of my interlocutors were in Philosophy; all of them, I think, were in disciplines and departments that are much more evenly gender balanced than Philosophy, which still tends to have a smaller proportion of female faculty than most of the rest of the Humanities. My guess is that the family-friendliness of academia varies not just by institution, but also by discipline, and by discipline not only according to the gender balance in the discipline but also other factors. Mason:

When we asked women in the survey whether they viewed research universities as family friendly, their opinions differed significantly depending on whether or not it was common in their departments for female professors to have children. Where it was common, 46 percent of female respondents agreed that research universities were family friendly. Where it was uncommon, only 12 percent of women agreed.

Philosophy is not very gender-balanced, less so than, say, History or Sociology, and Philosophy departments are therefore less likely to contain women with children. On the other hand, the discipline does not involve long trips to archives, or fieldwork; it really is something that you can do at home. Anyway, I’m curious whether women who have experienced this as interviewers would have the same impression as my committee members.

Third, I agree with the people in the Leiter thread who say that having children can make you more disciplined about what you do with your time or, to put it less contentiously, the time and energy you give up for parenting is not necessarily taken from your academic work. In the decade before I became a parent I probably devoted as much time and energy per week to political organizing as I subsequently did and do to parenting (and experienced considerably more stress from that than I have from parenting, partly because I am probably better suited to raising kids than political organizing, and partly because my first two children have been, after the first hellish 4 months, remarkably easy). I don’t have hobbies, and my time is always constrained by work or family, but that’s because I’m pretty committed to both. I wasted a lot of time in my twenties, and if it weren’t for the fact that I couldn’t possibly have met my wife much earlier than I did I’d regret not having had a family to occupy me at that time.

Three caveats/pieces of advice. Don’t expect to get much done in the first 3 months after the baby arrives. (And this is one of the big gender differences; most babies are ok for the first 10 days or so, so men can actually get something done, whereas women have to recover). Some pregnancies, and some babies, are very difficult (same is true, by the way, of some lovers, spouses, dissertation supervisors, dissertation topics, friends, parents, automobile accidents, drug addictions, illnesses, etc). And don’t go into the whole thing without Ferber (Advisors: there are many things you can do to make it more possible for your advisees to get through graduate school than otherwise, and giving them this book is among them).

Another quote from Leiter’s discussion, from a woman who does not seem to be in philosophy, and has had 2 children and is now having a 3rd.

As a last point about family friendliness, I do feel as though some faculty in my grad program (an R1) have written me off–especially now that I not only have kids but I’m out of residence. The expectation that I won’t finish has been, at times, palpable. The concurrent expectation seems to be that I’m out of the running for the so-called “big” jobs. Likewise I live under the assumption that whatever missteps or problems I have in the program should be attributed to my status as a mother instead of more correctly attributing them to advising issues. That has been a real discouragement, actually, inasmuch as my status as a mother has acted as a I don’t want to be reduced to my reproductive status. But that’s being a woman.

I see no more reason why motherhood should put you out of the running for “big” jobs than that visible pregnancy should put interviewers off hiring you, and it is possible, of course, that the commenter is misinterpreting the signals from her department. But I know very well that it is difficult for women who are thinking about becoming pregnant to have this sort of discussion with their professors, and probably also with their fellow students. I also suspect that its not an easy discussion to have among faculty, and also that faculty are not well aware of exactly how to give useful support to graduate student parents even if it is needed, which is why I’m glad that Leiter hosted the discussion on his site, and why I wanted to extend its life over here.

I’d be very curious to hear further well-informed and experienced answers to the “interviewing when obviously pregnant” question. And also to hear from women, in particular, who have either managed to combine parenting with graduate school, or have felt that they had to give up graduate school, or academic prospects, because of their commitment to their children.