Mama PhD

I’m a reviewer for Mama PhD, by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant, for MotherTalk!  It’s my first book review, so bear with me.

I requested to be a reviewer for the book because, as you all know, I’m a mama with a Ph.D.  Since the book was a compilation about women with PhDs who work in academia, I felt it was particularly relevant to my own career choice.  I thought that it would be a celebration of the accomplishments of women in academia, one of those books on how a woman can “have it all” with both career and family.  Since I made the decision to forego the typical post-doc-second-post-doc-tenure-track-junior-faculty-at-research-university pathway, instead choosing to go to a straight teaching career at a junior college, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it.

 

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t one of those books at all.  It was a very open, sometimes brutally frank, look at the academy and essentially how it fails women who want to also have a family.  And yes, some of the contributors talk about how it also fails men who want to have a family—but they also make the point that men are not responsible for the physical demands of both pregnancy, birth, and nursing a baby.

 

Many of the essays made me feel very…well, vindicated in my career choice is probably the best way to say it.  There were no essays by women who’d chosen the career track that I’ve taken.  All of those who went along the path to a tenured-faculty position in the “publish or perish” atmosphere of most schools felt that they were torn between the demands of their careers and those of their families.  I don’t particularly feel this way.  Since I am not prepared to be a full-time stay at home mom, and we need my health insurance, I often brag that I feel like I have the best job in the world.  My schedule is great and has some flexibility; I have winter break, spring break, all legal holidays, and 3 months off during the summer.  I spend 4+ months each year with my kids full time, yet I also work full time.  I have a career that I love, that challenges me, and that provides what we need financially (since J also works—it wouldn’t be much otherwise).

 

Clearly, it’s not perfect—we had to travel to get K over spring break or else would have had to wait until May.  I didn’t get any time off when he came home, having to be back at work on Monday after returning from Ethiopia on Friday, but the book made obvious that what I had believed was true about academia certainly seems to be the case.  I had a glimpse of it in graduate school, and still see some of it from my ex-advisor to this day.  The essays in Mama PhD really reminded me why I am glad I chose the career that I wanted.

 

However, there were a couple of essays that almost made me wish I’d gone the research faculty route.  One by Della Fenster, who is a math professor at the University of Richmond (my undergrad school), spoke of the speaking and travel opportunities for those who are in the research track.  I love to travel and love attending conferences, and wish I had more opportunity to do that.  (FWIW, I also loved U of R and the faculty there is what inspired me to go into teaching.)  At a junior college, we have very limited travel funds.  We go to conferences, but they tend to be smaller and often local.  We don’t get invited to speak many places.  It’s an opportunity that I wish I had; still, I don’t think I would trade the demands of that track for the life that I get to have.

I would have liked a couple of essays from women who went the path that I’ve taken.  The fact that not a single contributor worked at a junior college in a tenure-track position was disappointing.  Those who work at research universities look down on those in my job (we’re often seen as those who couldn’t hack it in research), and I think a few essays on what a junior college has to offer a Mama with a PhD would have been helpful.  It’s not a path that many people with PhDs even consider, and yet it’s one that I think many would find quite fulfilling.

 

I think this book should be required reading for any woman going into any sort of graduate education program.  And their partners.  When I started grad school, I naively thought that it would be supportive and flexible when I had my children (who we intended to conceive while in grad school); after all, my petri dishes of cells didn’t care what time I did an experiment.  I figured J and I would flex a lot of hours to limit our child’s daycare.  To some extent, we were able to do that.  I didn’t cut back on hours once he was born, I just went in a lot earlier and left earlier.  But I hadn’t realized that my boss, as well as other faculty, saw me leaving at 3 p.m. and thought I was “just a mom” and would never finish the program.  They didn’t see the hours that I was there between 5:30 a.m. and 9 a.m., so those hours didn’t really count.  And even though my productivity actually increased, since I was more efficient with the time I did have there, it wasn’t seen as equivalent to other graduate students in my lab.  That experience made me realize that I didn’t want to be like them anymore.

 

I wonder if I would have even tried to have a child while in graduate school if I’d read this book.  Whether I would have or not, I certainly would have been more prepared for what to expect.  I went from the “Golden Grad Student” in my lab, because of my input and productivity, to “just a mom” because I’d given birth.  It was a harsh realization.  Having read this book, it seems that what I experienced is pretty much the standard.  There is clearly a need for change within the academy, but it doesn’t seem high on the list of priorities for research universities.  Talented, highly educated women are moving away from this career choice because it punishes us for wanting to have a family.  And that's simply wrong.

Comments

[JessPond]

That IS a shame!!

It sounds like you made the right choice, though! :)

[electriclady]

Really interesting. My mother is a research scientist, and after I had my daughter and was feeling conflicted about going back to work (not that I had a choice, as the family's breadwinner), she told me that after I was born, she had a few months' maternity leave and then worked part-time for nearly a year--"part-time" meaning that she worked ONLY 40 hours a week. Yet for all the challenges she faced as a woman, a mother, and a minority in a field dominated by white men, she is harder than anyone on young women. She had a grad student who was older and a mother, and was constantly making disparaging comments about how that student didn't work as hard as the other (young, single, male) students and was always leaving early, her kids were always getting sick, etc. I guess women of her generation really had to absorb the values of the dominant culture in order to get ahead--let's hope that the women of our generation can bend the culture to our needs.

[krista]

It's the same in law. There are actually conferences now on how to keep women in private practice and yet creating "work/life balance" is thrown around like a buzz word, hypothetically and nothing concrete is ever done to ensure that it happens. Women are still judged when they leave at 5:30 or 6:00 to pick their children up from daycare.

[lucky2]

Interesting post & book. I had discussed the PhD route with a prof during my Masters program. "she quickly asked, do you intend to have kids & a family? if so, don't!" it made me wonder if it might just be @ my school. guess not!!!

[docgrumbles]

Right now I am still having those paniced thoughts about whether I have made a mistake not getting a tenure-track position. But then I notice that there are FAR more women in this dept than in my last one (pure research emphasis over there), and many have kids.

I surrepitiously asked about the university's attitude toward female faculty becoming pregnant at New Faculty Orientation, and all faculty I spoke with said that women are very supported when in happens.

Of course, I still haven't told my new chair despite my rather obvious bump. I actually feel guilty. Maybe because Boss L was one of two female faculty at my old dept and, until this year, neither had any kids (but plenty of publications).

I am hoping this new position, which doesn't even require that I publish at all, is the right choice for me as a (knock on wood) mother.

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