Do babies matter?

Academe, Nov/Dec 2002 by Mason, Mary Ann, Goulden, Marc

The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women

For women academics, deciding to have a baby is a career decision. Traditional narratives of the academic career must adapt to new demands and new constituencies.

When I first became the dean of the graduate division at Berkeley last year, I had an extraordinary experience. Fifty-one percent of the 2,500 new graduate students whom I welcomed were women. Thirty-five years ago that number would have been closer to 10 percent. The graduate students included not only those pursuing doctotal studies, but also those seeking professional degrees in law, public health, social welfare, optometry, and other areas. Berkeley has no medical school, but if it did, women would be close to the majority there as well.

The sharp increase in women's participation in graduate education is a striking national trend. There are significant differences by discipline--engineering, for instance, has produced far fewer women Ph.D.'s than English literature. Overall, women's participation in higher education, and particularly in doctoral and professional programs, has risen dramatically since 1966. The percentage of doctoral recipients who are women has risen from 12 percent to 42 percent, while the percentage of women among recipients of professional degrees has risen even more sharply. Women law school graduates, for instance, made up only about 5 percent of their classes thirty years ago, but they now make up almost 45 percent.

Does this steady climb in all disciplines and in all professional schools over the last thirty years indicate that women are on a winning streak? Are women finally achieving equality in the academy?

The employment patterns at the University of California, Berkeley, which are representative of those at other major research universities, indicate that while gender equality may be the reality for graduate students, it is a far different story for ladder-rank faculty, non-ladder-rank academic personnel, and staff. Using a body profile to illustrate employment demographics makes it clear that the experiences of men and women are in dramatic contrast. The drawing on the left in Figure 1 illustrates a composite profile of all employees. The head, at 1,283, represents the total faculty count on campus, including both tenured and nontenured ladder-rank faculty. The middle drawing in Figure 1 represents women employees. There are only 281 women faculty on campus, so the head is small. The drawing on the right represents men employees. This large-headed profile indicates that Berkeley has 1,002 male faculty members.

Moving down the body profile to the neck, the drawing on the left indicates that Berkeley employs a total of 386 non-ladder-rank academic personnel. These include lecturers, adjuncts, and an assortment of other academics, most of whom teach. The neck is particularly important since nonladder-rank faculty is the fastest growing segment in higher education. The women's profile in the middle demonstrates a substantial neck compared with the head, reflecting 256 non-ladder-rank personnel compared to 281 faculty, while on the men's profile at right, the neck is slender compared to the head, reflecting 130 non-ladder-rank academic personnel compared to 1,002 faculty.

In the three drawings in Figure 1, the torso represents the staff. The torso on the profile at left represents Berkeley's total number of staff 7,000. The shoulder regions represent the highest levels of management, where men prevail. The middle drawing shows us that women are overrepresented among the staff, particularly in the lower, nonmanagerial region. Women, it appears, have a body problem: they're small of faculty head, fairly large in the lecturer neck, and exhibit a substantial staff torso. The drawing at right shows that men, in contrast, have a large faculty head and a very small lecturer neck. The bottom of their staff torso is slimmer than that of women but they exhibit large shoulders since they are better represented among the directors and professional staff. Men taper down to buildings and grounds jobs at the bottom, while women spread out at the hips with a higher representation of clerical employees and food-service workers.

We should note that the "neck problem" is even more significant at other types of four-year institutions. At a large state university without a research focus, for example, the number of part-time and non-ladder-rank faculty, the neck, would be much larger than the number of ladder-rank faculty, the head. A majority of this segment of the teaching staff, sometimes referred to as the second tier, is composed of women, and the tier is growing. Recently the Coalition on the Academic Workforce announced that more than 50 percent of all undergraduate courses are now taught by non-ladder-rank instructors.

Underrepresentation of Women

Some analysts suggest that women in the professoriate are not as well represented as men because they have only recently gained degrees in large numbers. Time will take care of the problem, they predict, as more young women professors are hired and the older cohort, mainly male, retires.