A family friendly career

Walking into work today, my partner mentioned one of this colleagues is trying to figure out how to make it clearer to students earlier in their careers that academia is not as family friendly as it seemed.

"WHAT?! Who thinks academia is family friendly? No one I know thinks that."
"Well, the question is, how many people you knew at 21 thought that."

So I paused and thought about it. My incoming college class had  a 55/45 M/F ratio, the most equal class to date. My university had a reputation for gender discrimination. It also had a reputation for working to get past that. So the students who entered with me were all aware of this issue, if even as a point of trivia about our incoming class to be forgotten about later. I think for many women, this colored our view of our future.

I did not see a female professor until my junior year. In total, I had 6 female professors and 3 female TAs. Two of the 6 were not in full time employment by my university. This made me, and all my female friends, talk and think about our chances in academia. Consciously or not, we asked ourselves variants of the question, if our professors are having a hard time making it, what makes us think we can? So we asked around, and found out that, yeah.. it's hard. And that from the people who didn't have families. When talking to people about grad school, we heard the rumor that once we enter grad school, extra curricular activities were frowned on. Not only was this devastating to someone who had heard all her pre-college life that the way to get into college was by having lots of extra curricular activities, and whose social life was built completely around the things she did outside of class, this perception clearly had family implications for me. "If PIs frown on someone spending 20 hours a week swimming competitively, how will they feel about families?" Graduate student friends talked about having to move away from their boyfriends for post docs. Post docs talked about PI's passing them up for conferences out of a desire to "be nice to them" since they had just become mothers.

I can't think of a single point in my post freshman life when I thought that academia was family friendly. I can't think of a single female friends who wanted to be an academic who relished the idea of having a family while doing so. When I think back on it, I recall conversations with women on the fence leaning towards industry because they wanted a family.

Not so for the women at University E. They see few female professors, but they also see professors of both genders not come in every day. They see that our "schedules" are similar to school schedules so that it is easier to take time off with kids. They see that we "get to travel to fun cities for conferences." They don't see the rest of it? How is that?

I know at my last institute, I did my best to discourage young women from thinking that academia and motherhood was compatible, in spite of myself, mostly by looking like a miserable under slept zombie for the first few years of Epsilon's life. More explicitly:

"Hi professor, I saw you bike into work today with your trailer. I was hoping to see you pull your kid out of it."
"No, I've dropped him off at daycare. By the time I get here, there's only a laptop in there." If I'd pulled my kid out of the trailer, how did you think I'd be teaching your 10 am class?""How is having a kid and being in academia?"
Well, that's direct. How do I be honest, and not discourage a very smart woman from going into academia? "One of the reason's I chose academia was that I've tried, and hated working 9-5. I've always enjoyed being able to go camping on Tuesday and Wednesday, when the parks are empty, and know that I can make up by working over the weekend. You lose a lot of that flexibility after becoming a parent. You work when you have daycare, or when the kid's sleeping."
"Yeah, I like that about this lifestyle as well. I wouldn't want to give that up."
"I work 8:30-4:30 now, so it's not 9-5. That makes it better. Let's start today's class."

My partner thinks that much of the difference in perception comes from the lack of discussion/awareness about any sort of discrimination in the general public discourse. If people aren't trained to think about this as a possibility by growing up with it being discussed, they are less likely to be able to look ahead and see potential pitfalls. I don't know if that it the primary cause, though I don't have a candidate hypothesis.

I do know that conversations like that over at IBAM's place today makes me very sad. As it does when mentors like GMP get overwhelmed, or Isis thinks about quitting.

Jobs and odds and ends

Its job hunting season again. Which means a certain amount of paralysis on my part. In previous years,  I've done a lot of other very productive things in an attempt to avoid working on job packets. I look at the open emacs buffer where my research statement should be, or the e-mail address of people I am supposed to network with, and .... keep staring. Yesterday we found a solution. I grab my partner's computer and play angry birds while dictating e-mails to contacts and outlines of research statements. My partner looks at the computer screen. Tell me I'm not the only one with this type of strategy?

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I got an e-mail from my current position informing me that I have 10 days of vacation in 2012. Um.... Right. I recognize that for legal reasons employers need to tell employees these things. But what does this mean if the job is such that taking those 10 days of vacation is not actually plausible? As academics we struggle with vacation time. Whether it is as a grad student or post doc working with a PI who directly blocks vacation time, or indirectly makes it hard for one to take time off, or it is due to workloads we face due to our own ambitions, teaching loads, or external circumstances, or anywhere in between.

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On of the jobs I'm applying for asks for a supporting statement covering my activities during the last 10 years of my life! A biography?! I blog. I clearly like writing/talking about myself, so this could be a fun way to take a reader through my academic journey. But really? 10 years? If I had taken a more traditional path through grad school, or done so in certain European countries, this could leave me talking about late high school. The other thing that struck me about the description of supporting documents is that it specifically stated that I should include information like time taken off to care for/raise a family. I think this would be illegal in the US. I understand the need for women to explain gaps in their resumes due to time spent taking care of the very young, the very old or the very sick. But there is so much discrimination, conscious and unconscious that women and minorities face. I question whether, on the whole, talking about such gendered jobs explicitly helps a woman more by showing that the time off was "legitimate" or hurts her more by reminding the potential employer of her gender.