Faculty Forum: Making Graduate School More Parent Friendly
By Saranna Thornton
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Full-time careers in academia pose challenges to balancing work and family—particularly for women. Women, on average, complete their doctorates at the age of thirty-four. The average length of postdoctoral appointments in science is now two-and-a-half years, and postdocs are becoming more common in other fields. Add in a six-year pretenure probationary period, and it’s clear that waiting until after the tenure decision to have children is likely to pose substantial fertility hurdles for women.
Yet women who have children during the first five years after earning their doctorates have a substantially lower probability of earning tenure than childless women or women who have children earlier, write researchers Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden in an article published in the November–December 2002 issue of Academe. If a tenured faculty position is a student’s goal, graduate school may be the best time to begin a family, particularly for women. Unfortunately, there are many impediments to doing so.
Doctoral programs frequently invest tens of thousands of dollars in individual graduate students. Presumably, these investments pay off in the reflected glory of the successful students’ lifetime work (for example, positions at elite universities or significant research contributions). So, if the careers of alumnae (and some alumni) are being derailed by the challenges of trying to begin families while on the tenure track, then it makes sense for doctoral programs seeking to recoup their investments in their students to spend a little money to remove the impediments those students face when they bear or adopt children. Some impediments and suggested solutions follow.
First, in order to create incentives for students to complete their doctoral degrees quickly, many universities reduce salaries and stipends or increase tuition charges for graduate students after a specified number of years. A woman who bears a child typically needs a minimum of six weeks to recover physically from childbirth. Additional parental leave during the first year of a child’s life can also be of value to mothers and fathers. Yet financial penalties for delayed completion of the degree dissuade graduate students from taking time off. As a solution, graduate schools should adopt policies that stop the thesis clock for graduate student parents, just as many have adopted policies that stop the tenure clock for faculty parents. Such policies would allow graduate students to delay incurring financial penalties for a set period of time following the birth or adoption of a child.
Second, maternity leave policies for doctoral students tend to be informal. The amount of leave available, if any, and the likelihood that the student’s fellowship or other funding will be continued often depend on the generosity of the student’s major adviser.
Interviews with female graduate students indicate that they frequently feel constrained by the expectations of their advisers or by a lack of financial support to return to full-time study and research before they have fully recovered from childbirth. Institutions should provide formal, paid maternity leave of at least six weeks with an option for additional leave if there are pregnancy-related medical complications. Simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that female graduate students will not seek to become pregnant every year to obtain six weeks of “paid vacation.”
Third, when graduate students take a leave following childbirth or adoption, they often lose their school-funded health insurance. However, health insurance is needed to cover costs associated with childbirth or caring for newborn or adopted children. Maternity and parent-al leave policies should provide for continuation of a student’s health insurance, as would be the case if the student qualified for leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.
Finally, while universities increasingly provide on-site, high-quality day care, it is often expensive. On-site day-care charges for infants at the University of Michigan are approximately $14,000 a year, and at Harvard University they range from $19,000 to $24,000 a year. Many universities make subsidies available to graduate students, but only on a limited basis. Institutions should set tuition on a sliding scale based on family income or increase the number of scholarships for doctoral students.
Why should we make it easier for graduate students to begin families? There are several reasons. The tenure track has not yet changed enough to accommodate faculty who want to start families. Doctoral students are in many cases our research assistants and teaching assistants. When we smooth their transitions into parenthood, we recoup the investments we have made in them. Many of these students are likely to become our future colleagues—and possibly future AAUP members.
Saranna Thornton is Elliott Associate Professor of Economics at Hampden-Sydney College. Academe accepts submissions to this column. See the guidelines. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the policies of the AAUP.
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