It is a certain double-standard that is driven by the tenure and promotion process, a “masculinist” conception of endless production of research work irregardless of quality. I work in scholarly publishing and that deadline for scholarly production is only internal to the university system. Scholars and general readers of scholarly works certainly are not “holding their breath” for scholarly work to be published, the audience and market will be there when a work is completed. As well, if scholars had access to the average sales history of a scholarly title, they would certainly slow down their scholarly production. It is less than 5% of all scholarly titles that have stellar and significant sales histories in the first three years of release. Most good and solid scholarly titles trickle steady sales on the publisher’s backlist over 10, 20, or 30 years, the most essential types of titles for nonprofit university presses and their economic backbone (readers might consult Andre Schiffrin’s April 2008 “letter” in Harper’s about how essential a publisher’s backlist is for many reasons).

Don’t give up child rearing or other personal aspirations (many GLBT couples are adopting these days) for tenure or unrealistic, workaholic-type scholarly production, it’s not worth it. If your department denies you tenure because you have a kid, tell them to “f_ _k off ” on your way out the door, you should be relieved to not work with people who hold these attitudes. One of the top five graduate programs in history in the US denied two scholars tenure last year. Guess what? Both of them were women who had children AND met all the tenure requirements. So the implications are unstated but very present. One would be better off working a bartender gig or adjuncting (if financially possible) while doing good research and producing thoughtful and high quality work. It’s the quality of the research and thinking involved, not your institutional location. And it’s honest and somewhat out of fashion these days (a nod to the old independent public intellectuals). So go for it, you only live once!

And maybe it’s the old socialist in me, but I always make the point that we shouldn’t just talk about individual solutions but about health care, the best way to fight discrimination, child care etc etc

I’m glad to find people taking these issues seriously, because it seems to me that mothers in academia are, by and large, getting a raw deal. I’d say I have and haven’t: I like my job a lot, this institution and my colleagues are supportive and delightful, and it’s working out for me. On the other hand, my career is not the high-flying, wonderful opportunities to develop my thinking and contribute to the discipline, respect-garnering one I’d dreamed of. The men I know, and the women without children, have done better. I’d rather have this job and my children too, but most of all, I’d like to see more justice in the world. Mothers in academia are less in need of justice than lots of the world’s people, but unfairness anywhere calls for remedy.

Back on the original topic, though, I agree with those who point to the extra-curricular or after-hours expectations as particularly challenging for those with young families—everything from late meetings to dinners with job candidates to weekend conferences or retreats can be difficult to attend, with varying consequences for your professional development or recognition. Even things like snow days are complicated: often here the public schools close but the university does not, and as academics very often have moved far from their families, there’s no convenient grandparent to stay with the kids when you have to trek in for your classes or meetings. Still, those who point to the flexibility of academic work hours as an advantage are right: except for my teaching, I can do many parts of my job almost anywhere at almost any time.

To take account of that dual nature would involve, at some level, also giving up part of the ‘autonomous individual’ side: because accommodating pregnancy and motherhood with full justice to personal ambitions would encounter the paradox of needing to restrict some others’ such ambitions – viz. men at an equivalent career-stage, and women who choose not to become mothers.

Only if everyone – the fertile, the non-fertile, the male [reproductively active and not] – gave up some of what we currently mean by the freedom to pursue a career could life be balanced out so that child-bearing women had the same freedom as everyone else – and could still nurture their children to the fullness of their capacity. And the same arguments could be made for those lower down the scale of personal ambition, where it is economic necessity not professional advancement that produces jarring compromises of time and attention. I think that is a fine goal. A fully feminist, revolutionary goal in the grand old style. I heartily approve of it. But can anyone honestly see it happening?

But the most important thing is not whether both partners have achieved equality outside the home by both having careers, but rather if the domestic interactions (from nappy-changing to doing the laundry and dishes to sterilising bottles) are also made egalitarian. That is partially why despite my full understanding of the importance and significance (both emotional and physical) of breastfeeding, I chose to stop to do so after the third month.

I was doing the PhD part-time anyhow (because we were hoping to start a family) and I also had a supportive supervisor and husband. I managed to get the part-time PhD done within six years, which compares pretty favourably with friends who took four years full-time. So I think that if you are more efficient as a parent than as a non-parent, you can make up for having less time available, for something like a PhD, that is a relatively fixed amount of work.

The problem comes when you start competing for jobs, where (roughly speaking) the more academic ‘achievements’ you have, the better your odds are. I haven’t got as much hourly-paid teaching experience as some of my friends because of my daughter (now six): I either couldn’t arrange childcare for the relevant times or the cost meant it was uneconomic to do it. I don’t have as many articles written as people who haven’t had to spend several hours every day entertaining a small child, or who when they get on a roll can keep writing and not have to stop to go on a school-run. (In my experience, these kinds of time-costs are often not equally born by fathers and mothers: I have a friend who, like me, is looking for an academic job, but although he is the father of a school-age child, he seems free to go off on research trips abroad during school terms without any problem). It’s also somehow easier to justify the money spent on childcare or the demands you make on your husband for support when you can say tangibly: ‘this will mean I can get my PhD finished by X’, rather than ‘this will enable me to write an article more quickly which might possibly improve my chances for an academic job, but not necessarily’.

All this means that I constantly feel I am competing in the academic race with one hand tied behind my back. I don’t know whether I’d have got an academic job even if I hadn’t had a child, but I definitely feel it’s been a disadvantage.

In my experience as a mother of a 14 month old and as a graduate student, the dilemmas I’ve faced have been as much (if not more) about the choices and compromises I’ve had to make as a mother to sustain a career as a student. We should not sanitize our consideration of motherhood and academia by shying away from the gritty (and beautiful) realities of motherhood—One of my greatest struggles was feeling entitled to exclusively breastfeed my son while school was beckoning. Many of my peers introduced bottles early and adopted a rigorous and exhausting pumping schedule while away. It was my desire and choice to nurture a particular breastfeeding relationship with my son that prevented me from being away for long periods of time.

These are the types of choices women are making. It’s not just about R1 versus teaching college or pre-tenure versus post-tenure timing. Women are sacrificing and striving on both fronts—motherhood and academia. Women’s bodies and minds are at the center of this discussion, and both should be given consideration.

Of course, I’m on deadline, and I always get a little finicky under stress. But the whole process seems so ludicrous when you submit, wait four months, and receive one negative review from someone who never read past the abstract. I miss having a job where there was a real since of shared passion, a common goal. Now I see people steal and double-publish just to get that one extra pub…

I’m quickly becoming jaded (and exhausted).

Genius! Even in the most family-friendly departments, in smaller institutions, it’s pretty difficult for both partners in a marriage to have careers and raise kids. My husband’s sacrificed a lot to support my career (beginning with moving to the remote city where we now live) and we’ve both had to contort our lives in all sorts of interesting ways to deal with one special-needs child, as well.

Growing up as a faculty brat, with a mother who worked at occasional part-time jobs around my professorial father’s schedule, I saw a whole host of faculty wives carry out the social-planning and family support. Today, we’ve come a distance from those days, but much of the old paradigm still holds true. Faculty are still expected to have evenings (if they’re not teaching) at leisure for appropriate social activities as well as to be free throughout the week at odd hours for university events on top of the regular round of teaching and research.

Yeah, there seemed to be a bunch of guys in that thread saying “Oh it was tough but it worked out fine. My wife dropped out of grad school/the job market, of course, but—look, a giraffe!”

I’d be very curious to hear further well-informed and experienced answers to the “interviewing when obviously pregnant” question.

I know someone (not a philosopher) who interviewed for a prestigious fellowship while seven months pregnant and got a little speech (couched in general terms) from the interviewer, who of course was a very nice man, about how this was such a great fellowship that they were really looking for people who were fully committed to their academic careers, etc. And that was that.

More broadly, a key problem is that—as in many other good occupations—the ideal worker for a R1 Faculty Role is assumed to be single or have a wife at home, to the extent that many aspects of departmental administration invisibly embed that assumption, from the timing of seminars, colloquia and faculty meetings, to expectations for face-time at recruitment dinners, conferences, and so on. When women who do not fit this ideal worker norm arrive in a department, requests that some of these arrangements be altered or worked around tend to be perceived as looking for exemptions or “special treatment” and act as sources of resentment and I-told-you-so stuff from people who have trouble with the concept of social structure.

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).

These standards tend not to be applied even-handedly. Having children is perfectly normal (perhaps even expected) for career-oriented, fully-committed men with wives. For women, though, the presumption will tend to be that having children is both perfectly normal and also evidence they are not that focused on their careers or that they have “chosen” the path of lower career attainment in order to achieve “a balance between work and family”. See above re my friend’s interview experience. Bias of this sort need not be explicitly articulated in a committee meeting as a reason not to hire a candidate because, in the absence of anyone prepared to call it out, sexist considerations will tend to be funneled through the allegedly rational and objective assessment of the candidates’ ability, quality, potential, etc.

Moreover, to a greater degree than most academic disciplines, Philosophy is on the look-out for the next Boy Genius. One expects, indeed requires, the typical BG personality to come leavened with various eccentricities. Evidence of interpersonal weirdness or incipient nuttiness will, in male candidates, tend to be forgiven in proportion to the expected level of BG-hood the candidate has been typed by the market as possessing.

She was well aware of the unfairness of what she was saying, but pointed out that the roster of academic duties still carried the assumption that you had a wife who could help you “do it all”.

I’ve also heard these sentiments echoed by another old close friend who is tenure track in economics. In her case, they’ve chosen to delay having children until she gets tenure, since the level of work required for her to attain tenure would (in her opinion) preclude childbearing without her husband being willing to stay at home.

Like I said, anecdotal, but is there something in here about academic workloads in the US and the tenure system? (I note that these women are both in “hard” disciplines that are still more weighted to male faculty—so perhaps also a factor?)