The Baby Bias

The Baby Bias

By HAL COHEN

When Marcia Inhorn had her first child, she took a paid leave from the anthropology department at Emory University and, on return, took on extra classes to make up the teaching she had missed. But as her hours as a mom started to compete with her hours as a professor, her relations with the department soured.

''Some of the senior men saw my reproduction as interfering with my citizenship in the department,'' says Dr. Inhorn, who has since joined the University of Michigan. ''They didn't let children impede at all on their total, engulfing commitment to their careers, and although I did everything I was asked to do quite well, I was giving to my family as well.''

When she came up for tenure in 1997, there was no mistaking she was a rising star: she had published three books and numerous articles, won a major award and fulfilled her teaching and service requirements. ''They couldn't deny me tenure,'' she says, ''but it was written into my documentation, time and again, that I was a mom. That would never happen to a man.''

In a written review, the committee noted that her dedication had faltered -- ''due perhaps to the fact that she has recently had her first child and has had to juggle teaching obligations with those of new motherhood.'' While she always does an excellent job, the committee added, ''her own agendas and needs will at times win out over those of the department.''

The department chairman at the time, Bradd Shore, wonders what the problem is. ''If the expectations for her were somehow unreasonable because she was a mother,'' he says, ''you would see that at the point where she was going to get tenure. The proof is in the pudding, and in the end she got promoted.'' The department also made ''extraordinary allowances,'' he says, allowing her to take her children to work when necessary. ''The university,'' he says, ''does not make special provisions for working mothers by changing the standards for performance.''

Dr. Inhorn throws up her hands. ''You simply can't give 100 percent to the academy when you have children,'' she says.

CREATING a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,'' the recent study by the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, has rekindled a decades-old lament about the painful choices between childbearing and professional work. But perhaps nowhere has the debate been more heated than in the academy.

It would seem that a university -- with its ability to allow teachers to work from home, its paid sabbatical semester and its famously liberal thinking -- would be an ideal place to balance career and family. But by all accounts, the intense competition, the long hours and the unspoken expectations of the academy's traditionally male culture conspire to make it really, really hard to have a baby and be a professor.

Many women simply put off having children. But the juncture of the biological clock with the tenure clock -- the probationary period, typically seven years, during which an assistant professor must prove herself to her department before receiving a permanent appointment -- couldn't be more inopportune. The median age for receiving a Ph.D. is 34, so by the time a woman is up for tenure, she is 40 and confronting higher infertility rates.

''Creating a Life'' caused a stir by reporting that only 67 percent of ''high-achieving'' women -- lawyers, doctors and executives -- have children by age 40. A forthcoming study by the University of California at Berkeley found that among tenured humanities and social science professors in their 40's, only 38 percent of the women have children, compared with 61 percent of men; in the sciences, it was 50 percent compared with 70 percent of the men.

The statistics are no surprise to Martha West, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who works with the American Association of University Professors. ''Parenting,'' she says, ''is not a welcome event in the academy.''

To help ease women's Hobson's choice, the Association of University Professors approved a model policy last November drafted by Dr. West. In addition to calling for reductions or reorganizations of new-parent workloads, it recommends stopping the tenure clock for up to two years, whether or not a new parent takes a leave, to give new moms or dads more time to fulfill their tenure requirements.

The tenure system presents parents with several layers of challenges. Three criteria are reasonably objective: scholarship (measured by number of publications) and teaching and service (measured in hours). Children can easily soak up enough time to put any of these in jeopardy. But tenure decisions also rely on a fourth criterion, collegiality -- ''a concept that is, almost by design, impossible to define,'' says Pamela Haig, a researcher with the legal advocacy fund of the American Association of University Women. What with the secrecy of tenure committees, collegiality is sufficiently pliant as a pretext for tenure denial that in 1999 the Association of University Professors flatly recommended that it not be weighed in tenure decisions at all.

In practice, collegiality means adhering to a mostly unspoken assortment of expected behaviors, and having babies is not on that list.

Sharon Block, an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, remembers a comment made last fall by a senior faculty member in her department about what he called the two misfortunes that had caused her to take off much of the previous year: spine surgery and childbirth. ''I think that demonstrates what babies are from the academic perspective,'' she says. ''A pain.''

In timing and effect on family life, the tenure-track system mirrors partner track at a law firm. But in academia, the personal stakes are higher: after six or more years of preparatory graduate work, tenure-track professors start in the relatively meager $40,000's. They will not earn much more without tenure. They work like dogs. They have virtually zero job mobility. And if rejected for tenure, they're basically fired. In short, dropping off the tenure track means life as a low-paid, low-prestige adjunct or instructor. The majority of these are women -- academia's mommy track.

Of course, there are academics who are content to be child-free. The Harvard sociologist Barbara Reskin started teaching in the early 70's, when, she says, academic women almost invariably chose their careers over children. ''The women who were successful in my field worked all the time -- evenings, weekends, Christmas,'' so Dr. Reskin opted against children. ''It hasn't felt like such a sacrifice,'' she says, ''because the only alternative was not being a sociologist.

THE week after delivering her first child, in 1990, Katherine Bowie went back to teaching anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ''I felt I had to be Superman,'' says Dr. Bowie, who was then a 40-year-old tenure-track striver in a very small club: junior faculty mothers. ''I was hemorrhaging, as it turned out, but who could I talk to? There weren't any moms around to tell me I was bleeding too much.''

The next term, Dr. Bowie took a leave and stopped the tenure clock, but during her absence the department decided not to renew her appointment. ''You have to crank as much out as you can on the ten-

ure clock,'' she says, quoting conventional wisdom, ''so you must be some kind of idiot if you decide to try and start a family. Anyone creating distractions for themselves must not be aiming for the top.''

Dr. Bowie appealed successfully -- the administration was pushing women's issues and immediately understood that the dismissal was based on maternity, according to Janet Hyde, the campus's newly appointed vice chancellor overseeing gender equity, who spoke on Dr. Bowie's behalf at the department's appeal proceedings. ''I suggested some better ways to think about the issues,'' Dr. Hyde recalls. ''They saw the light.''

Dr. Bowie was reinstated and eventually received tenure. ''I worked my butt off researching and writing, to be sure that when I came up for tenure, I would be in unassailable shape,'' she says.

Most of her female colleagues waited for tenure to start a family. But by then it was too late, and they were unable. ''That's a heavy price,'' she says.

Dr. Bowie was a pioneer at Madison, which had adopted its tenure-clock policy just two years earlier. She testified before a state senate committee when a systemwide policy was adopted in 1994. ''This wouldn't happen again in my department,'' she says. ''People thought about things.''

With young professors increasingly having children, other selective research universities, including the University of California system, have responded with more family-friendly policies. Last year, the faculty union at the University of Massachusetts negotiated a package using elements of the model prepared by the American Association of University Professors. Basically, the more elite the institution, the greater the competition for faculty and the better the policies.

But most campuses, private and public, make no allowances beyond what is guaranteed by the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act: 12 weeks off, unpaid, with benefits.

The association's model policy was a flash point for the State University of New York's faculty union, which expects to bargain for a better family leave policy when contract negotiations are held in January.

For a normal birth, SUNY professors get only the 12 unpaid weeks mandated by law, though any banked sick days can be used to draw salary for half that time; an additional four-month leave can be taken but without pay or benefits.

In academia, the 12-week leave is awkward, as it usually requires canceling classes for the entire semester, saddling a professor with as much as half a year away from work, unpaid.

''Which is fine if you have a lot of money,'' says William Scheuerman, the union president. ''But most state workers don't.'' There's always that paid sabbatical semester, but scholars are loath to use it for maternity because they would fall behind nonparents on their research.

Administrators have concerns about longer family leaves. A professor on leave ''requires the chair to assess: do we cancel the classes? Do we go out and hire an adjunct, or do I have someone here who can teach this?'' says Stephen Beditz, assistant vice president for human resources management at SUNY at Albany. Relying on colleagues to pick up the load would be unfair, Mr. Beditz adds, but if the department has to hire outside help ''then you're looking at some serious resource issues -- there's not a whole lot of slack resources for that kind of thing.''

Mr. Beditz says he worries that formalizing clock stoppage and other accommodations -- currently an individual arrangement between department head and employee -- ''would take the prerogative away from the departmental chair, and that would have a deleterious and limiting effect on faculty governance.''

The idea of giving new parents more time to fulfill tenure requirements has proved controversial among the rank and file, too. Last winter, when The Chronicle of Higher Education held an online discussion about the new model policy, many respondents were ferociously against special rights for moms (one labeled them prima donnas). And some of these respondents were women. One professor who teaches philosophy at Rice University declared herself ''tired of children and breeders getting all the consideration all the time.'' An assistant dean at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., complained of ''maternity leaves, restricted scheduling and all sorts of 'emergencies''' that put childless people ''in a position of assuming tasks from those who do have children.'' Realize, she wrote, that with childbearing ''comes sacrifice and additional responsibilities.''

Whatever a policy allows, the high-pressure culture of tenure-track life often discourages professors from taking advantage of it. For instance, at the University of Michigan, considered a model for family-friendly campuses (M.I.T. has copied its policy), only 14 percent of assistant professors take modified duties and 12 percent stop their tenure clock.

Dr. Block at Irvine, for one, says she dares not extend her tenure clock, a decision that is made at the end of the probationary period in the University of California system. ''Everyone said it's career suicide -- senior faculty, chairs, administrators,'' says Dr. Block, who is entering the fourth year of her tenure clock and is expecting her second child. ''From what I've seen, everyone who's taken it is expected to do more.'' After giving birth the first time, Dr. Block took paid parental leave and medical leave, missing two quarters and then ''working ridiculously hard,'' she says. ''I felt I had to prove that having a child didn't negatively impact on my academic work.''

Belinda Davis, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., extended her tenure clock by a year to get her monograph on World War I Berlin into proofs in time for her 1999 tenure review. But according to two professors on her tenure committee, a senior colleague wondered aloud why she had produced only a single book and a handful of articles -- what would have been expected of an assistant professor on a normal tenure clock -- when she had had an additional year to do more because of her maternity. The committee recommended against tenure.

While the confidentiality of the proceedings and the murky dynamics of personnel decisions preclude knowing exactly why someone is denied tenure, Dr. Davis is convinced it was the lengthened clock.

''There seems to have been an assumption,'' she says, ''that because I had this so-called extra time I was supposed to have produced more research than what was expected for a normal tenure case.''

Even when denied tenure, making a case for discrimination is difficult. And though amendments to the Civil Rights Act preclude discrimination based on pregnancy, a 1995 ruling established a precedent for considering absence in the tenure decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, covering New York, Connecticut and Vermont, ruled against a biology professor who had been denied tenure because, she contended, she had put her academic career on hold to raise a family. Although the case turned on a technical question, the court also commented on family leave. ''A policy may discriminate,'' the decision reads, ''between those employees who take off long periods of time in order to raise children and those who either do not have children or are able to raise them without an appreciable career interruption. That is not inherently sex specific.''

Like Dr. Bowie, Dr. Davis appealed on procedural grounds. The department reviewed her case, including the consideration of her extra year. Dr. Davis was awarded tenure the following year.

The flexibility of the academic schedule can itself be a double bind for new parents. The hours may be flexible, but there are only 24 of them in a day, and the work has no limits for someone trying to earn tenure. A 1999 faculty survey at the University of Michigan found that the average academic worked more than 57 hours a week, tenure-track professors work longer and women work even more hours, devoting additional time to committees and meeting with students.

''To get half as far, a woman will work twice as long,'' says Joan Williams, a legal scholar at American University. Which is fine as long as a woman's time is unconstrained, she says, but throw a baby into the mix ''and that strategy stops working.'' Ms. Williams waited until she was assured tenure to start a family. She spent most of two years trying to get pregnant, including a course of fertility treatments, before resigning herself to the lengthening odds and placing her name on adoption lists. Finally, she conceived.

''It's set up as a zero-sum game,'' she says. ''Some women get to have children, but they pay the price of career marginalization, others get to have a career, but they sacrifice motherhood. Men don't pay either price.''

Rather than thinking in terms of choices, Ms. Williams suggests that universities ask themselves, ''How might we set up an academic workplace around the heroic assumption that the worker will have kids and raise them, and not farm out the care to someone else?''

''Young women feel entitled to be here,'' she says. ''They look at what's going on and say, 'This is outrageous.''' Until parenting becomes part of work culture, she says, ''women are not going to achieve anything approaching equality.''

Correction: August 9, 2002, Friday An article in the special Education Life section on Sunday about the difficulty of seeking tenure while rearing children misspelled the surname of a researcher with the American Association of University Women who cited the notion of collegiality as a criterion for tenure decisions. She is Pamela Haag, not Haig.

Hal Cohen is a freelance writer in madison, Wis., and a former contributing writer at Lingua Franca.