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Fall 2007
Volume 07, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Unforeseen Transformations : One Woman’s Reflections on Combining Philosophy and Motherhood

Jean Keller
College of St. Benedict

Motherhood for me has been all about transformations—in how I view myself as a person (I am not nearly as patient as I always thought I was!), in terms of which aspects of my job I put my time and energy into, my research interests, and my ever-evolving understanding of feminist philosophy. Here I tell my personal story of some of these transformations and fit into that story some of the empirical data on professors who are also mothers. What I have learned by doing this empirical research is that my story is not atypical. Three aspects of this literature that I focus on are 1) the effects of having early versus late babies on rates of achieving tenure for men and women, 2) the so-called “baby gap” between male and female professors, and 3) the effects of marriage and having children on the productivity (measured in terms of numbers of academic publications) of male and female scientists.

First, let me tell you a little something about myself. I am married to a philosopher, although that plays only a tangential role in my comments here. I got a tenure track job at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, two small, private, Benedictine liberal arts colleges with a joint curriculum, and my spouse came with me, as he likes to put it, dissertation in hand to seek his fortune. Pretty quickly, marrying me went from one of his worst to one of his best career moves. After several years trying to prove that he was indispensable, to the department and college, he was put on a tenure track line.

We have two children, a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, both adopted from South Korea. At some point in the adoption process, I realized with some surprise that I fell into the category of “older mother,” in that I had my first child at age thirty-eight. In this respect, I am not atypical for academic mothers, many of whom are “older mothers” because they postpone motherhood until after they achieve tenure. We postponed children until my tenure was virtually assured and my spouse was on a tenure track line. We did not want having children to damage both our careers. When we finally did decide to have children, we were not able to have them biologically. We do not know if this infertility was age related or not. For us, making the transition from birth children to adopting was effortless, and we now cannot imagine having created a family any other way. I mention this, however, because many women are deeply invested in the idea of having biological children and one “downfall” to postponing children until securing tenure can be infertility.

As you can see from the point # I in the Appendix, the timing of having babies can have a significant effect on men’s and women’s academic careers. Women who have early babies—defined as babies who join the family prior to five years after the parent earns a Ph.D.—are 38 percent less likely to achieve tenure than men who have early babies. Yet men who have early babies are slightly more likely to achieve tenure than men who do not have early babies. In short, babies work in favor of men achieving tenure and against women. Thus, having babies later in their career can be a good career move for women. But note: Mason and Goulden’s second study suggests that most of this effect takes place prior to achieving a tenure track job. If true, that suggests that bias avoidance strategies taken by academic mothers (such as postponing children until late in their career) are effective. But there are still costs associated with combining motherhood with a career in academia. See point # II in Appendix A: having late babies contributes to the baby gap between male and female professors. Sixty-two percent of women do not have children, twelve to fourteen years out from earning a Ph.D. versus 39 percent of men. Of course, we know that not all women want to have children, and it may be that academia contains a disproportionate number of such women. That is why the point #3 is important—a survey of the faculty at University of California said that 38 percent of women, versus 18 percent of men, had fewer children than they wanted.

To return to my story: there was an initial reaction of delight, both by my department and the administration, to our announcement that we would be adopting a little boy. But I was never very certain how “thick” this delight was and how much I could rely on it when it came to having those same administrators help us find reasonable accommodations to our changed family circumstances. Our situation was especially challenging for our institutions because we were so anomalous—we both taught in the same department and were committed to equally shared parenting, and so we both wanted to receive the same amount of parental leave—ideally, a one course reduction for each of us for two consecutive semesters. (What we were eventually awarded was a one course reduction for both of us for one semester, one of which was paid.) I worried that requesting accommodations to help us rear our children would count against us professionally. Concerns such as these are widespread and are part of why female faculty have late babies and why male and female faculty, when they are lucky enough to be at institutions that have family friendly policies, are often reluctant to use them.

The 2004 Mason and Goulden study suggests there is not a baby penalty once one is on the tenure track, and I need not have postponed children until after tenure. Perhaps this is true, yet my experiences at my small, Catholic Benedictine women’s college, combined with the stresses we experienced adjusting to parenthood, still make me think we did the right thing by delaying motherhood until my tenure was certain and my husband was past third year review.

Early in my parenting experience, I read with some relief a sociologist who described the first year with the first child as constituting a “crisis” for the relationship. That captured well and put into perspective my husband’s and my early experiences of parenthood. While we were in the midst of this initial crisis, I inquired whether it would be possible for my husband to take a second course off, so he would have a one course reduction the semester after our son’s arrival. My department chair reported that the academic deans informed him that my husband should look for a new job if that is what he wanted and that “that’s what daycare’s for.” Needless to say, this response did little to reduce our stress levels, and it created a chilly climate when it came to negotiating parental leave when we adopted our second child, a feisty little girl who quickly showed us what an easy baby our son had been!

I find it striking that our institutions’ response to our childcare needs was so different from that which greeted me two years later, when I inquired into a reduced contract so that I could help care for my father, who had recently been diagnosed with an aggressive and deadly cancer. Despite the fact that he lived 2,000 miles away and the semester was soon to begin, my institution quickly managed to find a way for me to drop one class so I could more easily fly east to help care for him. A year and a half after this, they also found a way for me to take a course off to “regroup” the semester after he died. I cannot overemphasize how much I appreciated my institutions’ responsiveness to my desire to care for my Dad; they demonstrated genuine compassion and amazing flexibility at a pivotal point in my life. However, I remain struck by the clear difference in their reaction to that care-giving need versus my need to care for my newly adopted and arguably equally needy children. I believe my desire to care for my father was seen as unchosen, non-delegable, and hence more legitimate than my and my husband’s desire to care for our new children. If I had more time, I would like to challenge these assumptions regarding choice, the delegable nature of childcare, and legitimacy—but I suspect that is the subject matter for a different paper.

As conscientious adoptive parents, we thought it important to do as much childcare as we could until our children were clearly attached to us and settled into their new family. Hence, in the first couple of years with our children, we did not use fulltime daycare and only a couple of people were trusted enough by us and our children to be their caregivers. I know we became more difficult colleagues to work with because of the “special needs” necessitated by our parenting approach. For example, there were significant limits placed on when my spouse and I could both attend departmental meetings and events—as we needed to work around our childcare provider’s schedule. While my department chair worked hard to meet our needs, I still found it hard always to be the party making special requests—especially when our commitment to equal parenting meant that not just one, but both of us became marginalized at work at the same time. Given the current construction of the academy, and its valorization of the “ideal worker” who can work fifty or sixty hours per week with ease, it is hard to accept institutional caregiving, such as that provided by my department, without feeling incredibly vulnerable—especially with the words of my deans echoing in my head. (Eva Kittay’s image of “nested dependencies” seems appropriate here—the idea that someone needs to be around to take care of the dependency worker. This idea is not currently institutionalized within the academy, which does much to explain the struggles academic women have in balancing work and family.) These experiences, coupled with 20-20 hindsight on how hard we both worked on the job prior to tenure and at home while we were adjusting to life with small children, lead me to believe that, even though we probably would have both achieved tenure if we had had children earlier than we did, postponing children until my position was secure and my husband’s was well-launched was the right decision for us. It helped us avoid a lot of anxiety about how our parenting responsibilities would be viewed by our deans and colleagues, and it helped us avoid having two of the most stressful and labor intensive phases of our lives overlap.

Transformations

So, what are some of the transformations that were brought about in my professional life by becoming a Mom?

For one, I have experienced a radical transformation in my typical work day/week. I can no longer put in thirteen- or fourteen-hour days to catch up on work when I fall behind; I no longer work 50-60 hour weeks, but try to keep a typical week to forty-five hours, with a fifty-hour maximum. And this past year, for the first time since I entered graduate school in 1987, I started taking (most) weekends off so I can spend them with my family.[1] With a reduction in my work hours, I have had to radically reconceive my job in order to maximize efficiency. I have become very selective as to what service obligations I take on. With so little time for such commitments, I want to make sure it is important that I do this work, that it is maximally interesting to me, maximally important in its possible effects, and that it takes a relatively minor investment of time. I probably attend 90 percent fewer meetings than before I had children. I am no longer on the electronic faculty discussion list. I no longer write lengthy e-mails to students to wrap up class discussion when an interesting point is made in the last five minutes of class. Before I had children, I was highly visible on my campus as the director of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWST) at a women’s college/men’s university. I was known as a highly effective administrator. After I had my first child, I was asked to run for election for three of the top administrative positions (but below dean) that a faculty member can have at my institution. Needless to say, I turned down these and other administrative opportunities and any possibility that I might some day become part of academic administration (which is something I have considered and my GWST colleagues have strongly encouraged me to do) have been put on indefinite hold and probably will not materialize. I have gone from being highly visible on campus to almost invisible, in four short years. That has been a really bizarre experience.

In all the above ways, I clearly am actively marginalizing myself at work in order to have a more sane life and time with my family—spouse, kids, and dying father. (This self marginalization at work, I should add, is something that my co-parenting spouse is also actively doing.) Yet, there is a job related “up” side to this reduction in my work week and emphasis on efficiency. During the past four years, despite adding two kids to my family and losing my Dad, I have also had the most intellectually vital time of my graduate and professional career and have been more productive in terms of written work, publications, and ideas for future research, than at any other time in my career. Part, no doubt, has to do with being a mid-career professional—I have had the opportunity to develop philosophical interests beyond those that occupied me in graduate school—and part is due to the fact that between parental leave, leave for my Dad, and sabbatical, over nine semesters I was exempted from teaching seven classes. But part is definitely directly related to becoming a parent and my new approach to work. While I cannot do service work and meetings easily because they are inconveniently timed and someone else determines how labor intensive they will be, I find writing can be squeezed in at any time of day and keeps me more in control of my workload. These factors have helped me re-prioritize my work so that research is higher profile in my work life than it ever was before children.

Examination of the empirical literature (Appendix A, #III) suggests that I am typical of academic mothers in my effort to curb my work hours, although I am probably not realistic in wanting to limit my workweek to forty-five hours. The literature on academic mothers’ research productivity focuses on female scientists and gives mixed responses as to whether children make female academics more, less, or simply as productive as women without children. The research that indicates that academic mothers are as or more productive than their non-mother counterparts suggests that it is through such steps as giving up personal time, focusing on research, limiting contact with undergraduate students, and limiting committee work that academic mothers are able to maintain their productivity. This research suggests that I might not be engaging in self-delusion when I think of my mothering years thus far as some of my most productive time, philosophically speaking.

Motherhood has also been transformative for my professional life in that I have found being a Mom intellectually rich. Being a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done and figuring out how to develop cooperative relationships with my kids at their various stages of development is a huge and fascinating intellectual puzzle to me as well as a daily moral practice. Add to this, being the Caucasian adoptive Mom of two Korean-born children, and all the complex ethical issues that raises, the challenges of trying to engage in equal parenting in a society in which this is still very much the exception, and trying to have a child-centered parenting style in a society that, I am convinced, really does not care about children and is in many ways toxic for them—then I have not just become a parent, I have entered into a whole new research program!

Thus, becoming a Mom has transformed my philosophical interests. To focus on just one of them here, it has transformed my understanding of and relation to feminist philosophy. In graduate school I wrote on care ethics as a critic of Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care. Granted, the ethic itself has changed dramatically in the intervening years, but so, too, has my relation to it. Reading Eva Kittay or Nancy Folbre or Joan Tronto on the devaluation of women’s care-giving labor is a very different experience for me now that I am a Mom. I viscerally understand how very challenging and underappreciated this work is; how good care-giving can open up new realms of possibility for a child, emotionally, intellectually, and ethically; how vital this work is if we are to have a well-functioning society; and how many social supports need to be in place if it is to be done well. While in graduate school I saw care ethics as a reactionary backlash to feminism; now I see critical examination of the many ways women’s care-giving work has been marginalized, naturalized to women, and devalued as radical, yet transformative and vitally important feminist philosophical work.

In conclusion, my answer as to how well motherhood and philosophy combine is mixed. On the one hand, my survey of the literature suggests that, personally, I have done remarkably well with the career/family balance: I have the number of children I want, my marriage to my first husband is going well,[2] and I am tenured at a college I really like. Moreover, motherhood has been an intensely challenging and stimulating experience that has allowed me to shift the direction of my career and place an increased emphasis on research. However, motherhood has also necessitated that I marginalize myself at work by sharply decreasing my service commitments and participation in meetings. Immediate results of this change have been a much greater sense of isolation at work (I primarily interact with students, not my colleagues), a significant loss of visibility on campus, and, with that, a sharp reduction in the recognition and validation for my work that I used to get from my colleagues. While I think focusing on research is probably a more secure route to promotion than service, at my private liberal arts college I have some concern that focusing on teaching and research will not allow me to advance to full professor. The path I am currently on will not allow me to take on a leadership position at my institutions. As a big picture thinker who has strategic planning in her blood, I feel ambivalent about that career trade-off. And part of me is wondering about the research I found that claims that the preschool years are the most productive ones for academic Moms.[3] Why would this be, I wonder? Is this solely the effect of the shortness of the school day as compared to the daycare day? Or do mothers of older children get magically transformed into soccer Moms who are so busy shuttling their kids around that they no longer have time for research? Or do they get burnt out from living a life devoted to teaching, research and family, with so little time for themselves and other professional and personal contacts that they drop the research? Looking forward into my career, I have more questions than answers.

1. A recent study by Jacobs and Winslow suggests that there is one work-related bonus to becoming a parent—married mothers and fathers work less than those who aren’t parents or aren’t married and, as a result, express less dissatisfaction with their workload (117, 120).

2. Mason and Goulden (1994b, 93) and Perna (7) report significantly lower probabilities of marriage for ladder rank female faculty than male faculty as well as higher rates of divorce for ladder rank females versus males.

3. Studying academic scientists, Fox finds that mothers of preschoolers are more productive than women without children or who have school-age children. She attributes this result to the fact that this is a socially selective group, especially in how they allocate their time.

Appendix: Overview of Data on Combining Motherhood and Academe

I. Effects of Having Babies on Tenure and Employment

Effect of Early Babies on Tenure Achievement:

• “Men with ‘early’ babies—those with a child entering their household within five years of receiving their PhD—are 38 percent more likely than their women counterparts to achieve tenure.”[1]
• Fathers of early babies achieve tenure at slightly higher rates than those who don’t have early babies.[2]
• In a later study,[3] Mason and Goulden argue that this gap kicks in prior to securing a tenure track position. “Women with children younger than six were the least likely of all groups to secure a ladder-rank faculty position.” While “married men with children younger than six were the most likely of all groups to secure a tenure-track position.”
• Mason and Goulden found neither a baby penalty nor a marriage penalty for women on tenure tracks; rather, women, regardless of marital or child status, were less likely than men to achieve tenure.

Effect of Late Babies on Tenure Achievement:

• Women who have late babies and women without children achieve tenure at about the same rate, and higher than women who have early babies.[4]

II. The Baby Gap

• 62% of tenured women in the humanities and social sciences do not have children in the household, 12-14 years out from earning a PhD.[5]
• Only 39% of tenured men in the humanities and social sciences do not have children in the household, 12-14 years out from earning a PhD.[6]
• But note: “second tier” women, defined as “those who are not working or who are adjunct, part-time, or ‘gypsy’ scholars and teachers” have children at rates much like male professors.[7]
• In a survey of the entire ladder rank faculty of the University of California, (4,400 respondents out of 8,700 faculty), 38% of women (as compared to 18% of men), said they had fewer children than they wanted.[8]

III. Effects of Having Babies on Academic Women’s Work Hours and “Productivity,” measured in terms of numbers of Published Papers

Hours Worked:

• A University of California study suggests that women between ages 30 and 50 put in 101 hours each week on caregiving, housework, and professional responsibilities combined, compared to 88 hours for men with children and 78 hours per week for male and female faculty without children.[9]
• According to this same University of California study, these are the number of hours per week faculty devote to professional work, according to self report[10]:

Research Productivity

Information on how children and marriage affects female scientists’ productivity, measured in terms of publications, is mixed. There is widespread agreement that men overall publish more than women overall, and that married men and women publish more than their non-married counterparts. But some studies show that having children has no effect on women’s productivity, while others show it has a slightly negative but insignificant effect, and yet others that it has a positive effect.[11] Fox reports that mothers of preschool-age children are more productive than women without children or with school-age children.[12] Stack reports the opposite,[13] although he differentiates between the positive effects on productivity for women in the female dominated social sciences versus negative effects on productivity for women in the male dominated natural sciences.

Additional Sources

Cole, Jonathan and Harriet Zuckerman. “Marriage, Motherhood and Research Performance in Science.” Scientific American 256.2 (1987): 119-25.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Loves Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. NY: Routledge Press, 1999.

Perna, Laura. “The Relationship beween Family and Employment Outcomes.” New Directions for Higher Education 130 (Summer 2005): 5-23.

Thornton, Saranna. “Where—Not When—Should You Have a Baby?” Chronicle of Higher Education 51.7 (10/8/2004): B12-B12.

Valdata, Patricia. “The Ticking of the Biological and Tenure Clocks.” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education 22.20 (11/17/2005): 34-47.

Ward, Kelly and Wolf-Wendel, Lisa. “Work and Family Perspectives from Research University Faculty.” New Directions for Higher Education 130 (Summer 2005): 67-80.

Williams, Joan. Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What You Can Do about It. NY: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wolf-Wendel, Lisa and Ward, Kelly. “Academic Life and Motherhood: Variations by Institutional Types.” Higher Education 52 (Oct. 2006): 487-521.

Endnotes

1. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. “Do Babies Matter (Part II)? Academe 90.6 (Nov. 2004a): 10-15.

2. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women.” Academe 2002. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe Accessed 14 Feb. 2006.

3. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. “Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy.” Annals, AAPSS 596 (Nov. 2004b).

4. Mason and Goulden, “Do Babies Matter?” 2002.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Mason and Goulden, “Do Babies Matter (Part II)?” 2004a.

8. Ibid.

9. Mason and Goulden, “Marriage and Baby Blues,” 2004b: 98.

10. Mason and Goulden, “Marriage and Baby Blues,” 2004b: 99. Note, this is a bigger gap in hours worked than reported by Jacobs and Winslow (Jerry Jacobs and Sarah Winslow, “Overworked Faculty: Job Stresses and Family Demands.” Annals, AAPSS 597 (Nov. 2004), 117). Based on an examination of the 1998 National Survey of Post-Secondary Faculty (NSOPF), they report that married mothers work four hours per week less than single women without children, while for fathers the gap is two hours per week.

11. For example, compare Mary Frank Fox, “Gender, Family Characteristics, and Publication Productivity among Scientists,” Social Studies of Science 35.1 (February 2005): 131-50 and Steven Stack, “Gender, Children and Research Productivity” Research in Higher Education 45.8 (December 2004): 891-920.

12. Fox, 140.

13. Stack, 914.

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