Bumps in Road for Academic Mothers Found at UC

Inside Higher Ed today summarizes findings in a new book based on UC and other data arguing that female academics with children face both career and marital bumps in the road.

…Written by long-term collaborators Mary Anne Mason, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley; Nicholas Wolfinger, associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah; and Marc Goulden, director of data initiatives at Berkeley, the work also looks at the effects of successful careers in academe on professors’ personal lives…

Concerns about time demands in relation to caretaking, and worries that advisers, future employers and peers would take their work less seriously were all reasons female Ph.D. students, more than male, cited for not having a child or being uncertain about having a child in one survey of graduate students in the University of California system. In another survey of postdoctoral fellows in the system, more than 40 percent of women who had children during their fellowships were considering changing their career plans to those outside academic research, compared to 20 percent of childless women with no plans for children…

More info on the book – Do Babies Matter? – can be found at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/06/new-book-gender-family-and-academe-shows-how-kids-affect-careers-higher-education