Content area
Full text
Since 1998, more than a dozen articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education have argued that academia should be more supportive of faculty members who attempt to balance family and work responsibilities (e.g., Williams, 200Oa; Wilson, 1999). Generally, these articles point to the problems faced by those trying to achieve this balance and suggest ways in which higher education could be more supportive of this effort. Simultaneously, many administrators are responding to faculty demands to adopt "family friendly" policies on their campuses (Raabe, 1997). Recognizing the current political environment, even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently called for colleges and universities to formalize policies for stopping the tenure clock for new parents (AAUP, 2001). The AAUP statement notes, "The lack of a clear boundary in academic lives between work and family has, at least historically, meant that work has been all pervasive, often to the detriment of family" (p. 2). Despite some progress, advocates of family-friendly policies argue that academia has a long way to go in sufficiently supporting faculty members with families (Williams, 2001). That is not to say, however, that everyone in higher education is supportive of such policies. Indeed, there are those who argue that some of these efforts at accommodating parents are fundamentally unfair and "privilege breeders at the expense of the childless" (Chronicle Colloquy, 2001).
The problems of faculty members with children recently have received increased attention and consideration in the literature and in practice because of changing faculty demographics. Today, women make up an increasing share of new faculty hires (Finkelstein, Seal, & Schuster, 1998). Women faculty are less likely to have children compared to women in professions such as law and medicine (Cooney & Uhlenberg, 1989), and only 31 percent of current women faculty have children (Perna, 2001). Still, the demographics (both age and gender) of the newly hired faculty suggest that an increasing number are likely to want to have children (Varner, 2000).
The focus of this study is on women faculty, in large part because they continue to bear the brunt of childrearing responsibilities in our society (Hochschild, 1989). For those newly hired women faculty who want to have children, the tenure clock often ticks simultaneously with the biological clock, requiring them to find...