{"id":2587,"date":"2021-01-04T07:00:13","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2021-10-24T13:15:01","modified_gmt":"2021-10-24T18:15:01","slug":"the-spector-of-motherhood-in-academic-science-and-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2021\/01\/04\/the-spector-of-motherhood-in-academic-science-and-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spector of Motherhood in Academic Science and Engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Gerd Altmann<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reposted with Permission from the Gender & Society Blog\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Why do women leave academic science and engineering? This puzzle has plagued scholars and practitioners for decades. Despite a rising presence in graduate programs,\u00a0women still constitute<\/a>\u00a0only 24 percent of tenured professorships in the natural sciences and only 15 percent in engineering fields in the US.<\/p>\n

A popular explanation is that the job is very demanding. The work hours are long, and the structure, like the ticking tenure clock, does not make combining a career with parenting easy, especially for women. This is even more apparent now that COVID has\u00a0exposed and exacerbated<\/a>\u00a0the disproportionate impact of caregiving responsibilities on\u00a0women\u2019s academic careers<\/a>. It\u2019s no wonder that some women don\u2019t want to stick with it.<\/p>\n

Though parenting demands are undoubtedly\u00a0critical<\/a>, they don\u2019t paint a complete picture. Many women leave\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0they have children, and therefore,\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0they presumably encounter work-family conflicts. Further, parenthood\u00a0doesn\u2019t explain why<\/a>\u00a0women are more likely to leave science and engineering careers than other demanding professions, like law or medicine.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, studies of academic workplace culture can offer some insight: gender-based\u00a0discrimination<\/a>,\u00a0exclusion<\/a>, and\u00a0harassment<\/a>\u00a0have been documented for decades in academic science and engineering. But knowledge about the ways in which academics actually communicate beliefs and assumptions about motherhood, in particular, remains limited. As such, it is an open question as to whether or not exposure to workplace beliefs about motherhood might help explain gender differences in early-career decision making.<\/p>\n

THE RESEARCH<\/h2>\n

Our study<\/a>, based on in-depth interviews with 57 young, childless, PhD students and post-docs in natural sciences and engineering fields at four universities, fills this gap. We find two critical things. First, the young women\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>men that we talked to described a pervasive workplace culture that frames motherhood, but not fatherhood, in opposition to legitimacy as a scientist or engineer. In this context, it is widely believed that motherhood is controversial and should be feared, rejected, and hidden. Second, these ideas about motherhood disadvantage women in their day-to-day interactions and, ultimately, motivate some of them to leave academia.<\/p>\n

Interviewees told stories of faculty saying things like \u201cThere\u2019s more to life than babies\u201d and \u201cI don\u2019t understand why women complain . . . you just have to decide you get a family or a career in chemistry, one or the other and just accept it.\u201d One recounted how a professor\u2019s \u201cgist was that having children is sort of narcissistic. And she\u2019s above that . . . like, simpletons want to have kids.\u201d When asked what topics she might discuss with her dissertation advisor, one graduate student explained: \u201cIf it were something [like] \u2018I\u2019m having a child\u2019 . . . I would feel uncomfortable about how he\u2019d receive that because of the \u2018women always fail\u2019 thing.\u201d Some described an alarmist narrative about motherhood, such that women\u2019s, but not men\u2019s, reproductive plans and decisions were publicly discussed and critiqued by colleagues.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, most women reacted negatively to this culture. Words like \u201cscary,\u201d \u201cfrightening,\u201d \u201cworry,\u201d \u201cstruggle,\u201d and \u201cstressed\u201d routinely came up when we asked women their thoughts on combining family with a career in academic science or engineering. These words were never used when we asked men the same question. The more women were taught to fear motherhood, and the more they felt they could not discuss family plans, but rather had to reject and hide them, the more these plans seemed to pose an insurmountable obstacle to career success. We use the phrase the \u201cspecter of motherhood<\/a>\u201d to describe these circumstances.<\/p>\n

These beliefs and practices surrounding motherhood made it particularly difficult for young, childless women to gain professional respect. Women recounted stories of having their commitment questioned and being asked why they were getting a degree since they would likely \u201cend up dropping out anyway to have babies.\u201d Others realized they would be taken more seriously and given more attention from their advisors if they made it known that they did\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>plan to have children. These experiences taught women that their already questioned presence in the profession would likely become more tenuous if they were to become mothers in the future.<\/p>\n

We show how this recognition\u2014that gaining professional respect requires continuously engaging in practices that reject, denigrate, and hide motherhood\u2014disproportionately drives women away from academia. Of the people we interviewed who had already decided to leave academia, despite originally being open to it when they started graduate school, the specter of motherhood was a factor in nearly all of the women\u2019s rationales. It was not a factor in any of the men\u2019s.<\/p>\n

It is noteworthy that most of the men and women we interviewed disliked or disagreed with these norms and practices around motherhood. Most perceived them as \u201cextreme\u201d, \u201codd,\u201d and generally out of step with \u201cnormal\u201d people\u2014people who presumably value family and see motherhood as an ordinary aspect of life. Given that, it is not surprising that some women are unwilling to engage in this unusual approach to family life, especially if they can still achieve career success outside of academia that doesn\u2019t require them to give up motherhood.<\/p>\n

Our findings offer insights for academic institutions<\/a>. A larger presence of mothers could help dispel the specter of motherhood and so policies that lead to better recruitment and retention of mothers, like tenure clock extensions are necessary. But our work reveals that interventions that target\u00a0attitudes<\/em>\u00a0about motherhood are also critical. Programs that raise awareness about the many mothers who are successful academic scientists\u00a0 and that describe the benefits of academia to mothers\u2014like, scheduling flexibility and job stability\u2014are crucial to counter the spectre of motherhood we discovered. Programs should also address motherhood during graduate advising to normalize seeing and talking about children in workplace settings.<\/p>\n

Our study<\/a>\u00a0is focused on academia but the specter of motherhood may be present in other professions, especially elite male-dominated ones. If ideas about motherhood are similarly powerful in shaping women\u2019s career aspirations in other occupations, then measures that target these attitudes are\u00a0 critical for addressing the stalled progress toward gender equality more broadly.<\/p>\n

Sarah Th\u00e9baud<\/strong>\u00a0is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research identifies cultural, social psychological, and institutional processes that contribute to gender inequalities in the workplace, families, entrepreneurship, and higher education. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and was a postdoctoral\u00a0<\/em>
\nfellow at Princeton University.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Catherine J. Taylor<\/strong>\u00a0is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a mother. Her main research and teaching areas are gender, work and occupations, social psychology, health, and methods. Before joining the faculty at UCSB, Professor Taylor earned her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University, was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University, and was a faculty member\u00a0<\/em>
\nat Indiana University.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reposted with Permission from the Gender & Society Blog\u00a0 Why do women leave academic science and engineering? This puzzle has plagued scholars and practitioners for decades. Despite a rising presence in graduate programs,\u00a0women still constitute\u00a0only 24 percent of tenured professorships in the natural sciences and only 15 percent in engineering fields in the US. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,3109,40251,104888],"class_list":["post-2587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-motherhood","tag-workplace-culture","tag-workplaces"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2589,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions\/2589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}