The Mommy Handicap

In a provocative column on The Chronicle's Web site today, Amy Kittelstrom, an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, argues that "academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas." She writes:

Give it its own category; call it "reproductive allowance." For my two "easy" pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That's aLouis Vuitton Odeon GM book right there, and then some.
Let's face facts, she writes: Time spent on childbearing and child rearing "is time away from scholarship," so why not openly acknowledge that motherhood limits scholarly "productivity in ways that fatherhood does not"? Not talking about it only "perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn't hinder women's careers at all," Kittelstrom writes.

And it is a major handicap, she notes. According to research by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley, married women with children are much less likely than their male counterparts to land tenure-track jobs and get tenure. "But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men," Kittelstrom adds.

Let's not forget why academic dads are so productive: Their partners are picking up the slack for them at home, she writes:

Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls "ideal workers." The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls "marginalized caregivers," the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three Louis Vuitton Stacked months to years. [...]
For the duration of a full-time caregiver's occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
Which is why it's a mistake for universities to treat academic moms and dads alike and make book publication the main criterion in hiring and promotion, Kittelstrom concludes:

When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn't be penalized for lackingWedding Gloves reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Readers, tell us what you think of Kittelstrom's proposal. What do you think is the best way to improve the career prospects of academic mothers?

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