Child Rearing as a Career Impediment to Women Assistant Professors

Parenthood, Professorship, and Librarianship: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

“…Their subjects crossed all disciplines within one research university. 26 This number is much greater than the 43% of academic librarians with children overall, and the 27% of librarians with young children during the tenure-track years found in this study. It is surprising that librarians in this study had fewer children than faculty in other disciplines considering that librarianship is a feminized field.…”

Gender and the Editorial Process:World Politics, 2007–2017

“…15. For examples of studies discussing challenges facing female academics, see Finkel and Olswang (1996), Perna (2001), Monroe et al (2008), Wolfinger, Mason, and Goulden (2008), Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2012), Mitchell and Hesli (2013), and Gasser and Shaffer (2014). For discussion of how race can compound these challenges, see Monforti and Michelson (2008).…”

Academic Motherhood: Managing Complex Roles in Research Universities

“…In contrast, Ropers-Huilman (2000) found that, even though women faculty were given mixed messages about having children, they sought coherence among the various aspects of their lives and many "spoke of the ways they envisioned their family and work experiences as complementing each other" (p. 26). Finkel and Olswang (1996), in a survey of women faculty at a research university, found women perceiving that the time required by children poses a serious threat to tenure. Supporting this finding, they found that almost half the participants in our study were childless as a result of their careers and that 34% of those who delayed having children did so because of their careers.…”

“…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 ways to make being a professor and a mother a reality (Varner, 2000;Varner & Drago, 2001). Institutional accommodations were previously deemed unnecessary when many academic professionals were men with stay-at-home wives or were women who opted not to have children (Finkel & Olswang, 1996;Tierney & Bensimon, 1996;Williams, 2000a).…”