Review of The PhD Parenthood Trap: Caught Between Work and Family in Academia

Abstract

As I write these words, it’s a Friday evening at 8 pm and my four-year-old daughter and twenty-month-old son are playing and watching television in the background of the living room where I have my desk set up so that I can multi-task between reading, writing, adjusting the volume, and fetching cereal or some other snack. Yet, I know if parents like myself do not find ways to become tenured, productive academics, our discipline and especially our students will suffer from the loss of diversity. Many of us have heard some variation of the joke that academics have all the flexibility in their work... the flexibility to work all the time. It is true, the highly individual and potentially limitless structure of academia, and of research in particular, incentivizes working beyond what could traditionally be called “normal working hours.” As academics, we build our own research agenda or “pipeline.” That said, research success relies on various gatekeepers and the stakes for success are very high (e.g. tenure). This system demands and further incentivizes continuous productivity—to an extent, those who are able to put in more hours, whether in research, teaching, or service, are more “successful.” Preserving time and space for personal life and activities, is the responsibility of the individual. However, for parents (and other caretakers), the demands for personal time are not solely internal, and productive and engaged academic parents often find themselves struggling and juggling to achieve a balance between their academic work and tending for their families. One of the key challenges of academic parenthood is that typical childbearing ages coincide with the early academic years when the stakes are at their highest (dissertation, job market, tenure). For most, writing a dissertation, landing an academic job, and achieving tenure are nearly impossible without working beyond the 40-hour work week. Professional tasks not only push their way both into time parents want to spend time with their children, but also more problematically into hours when there is no or limited childcare. While academia can be an exceptionally rewarding career and can indeed offer some degree of flexibility, parents, caretakers, and women especially, struggle to balance this demanding (even if self-imposed demanding) career with their home lives, creating what Crawford and Windsor refer to as “the PhD Parenthood Trap.” The implications of parenthood in academia are numerous. The focus of this review is how “chutes and ladders,” a range of policy-level and individual factors that may