The Dilemma of the ‘Double Day'

Although men are doing more, many women in higher education still find they have two domains – the university and the home

It's a new twist on an old theme. Men have done it for years — left their families temporarily so that they could pursue better opportunities. And now women in the academy appear to be doing it, too.

We should be clear, however, on one point: No numbers exist to indicate how widespread this phenomenon is, while plenty of evidence documents the woes of mothers at the other end of the spectrum.

As Dr. JoAnn Haysbert, provost and chief operating officer of Hampton University and a mother of five, says with a sigh, "The academy is not a friendly place for mothers."

In that respect, it's little different from the rest of American society. Last year, for example, Catalyst — a leading research and advisory organization working to advance the careers of women in business and the professions — asked 3,000 women in their 20s and 30s to name the biggest barriers to their advancement. The culprit, the women said by a 68 percent margin, was family and personal responsibilities, beating out lack of mentoring, lack of expertise and even stereotyping and sexism.

Similarly, there's no question that there's an academic mommy track and that it has derailed many a promising career. A University of California-Berkeley study released last year found that young mothers were far less likely than young fathers to achieve tenure: 24 percent less likely in the hard sciences and 20 percent less likely in the humanities and social sciences.

Women who had babies earlier in their careers were far more likely to find themselves mired in low-paying, low-status, part-time positions as lecturers and adjuncts, the study said. And it also noted that women in the academy who did achieve success appeared to sacrifice child-bearing to do so: 62 percent of women in the humanities and social sciences and 50 percent of those in the hard sciences had no children 14 years after achieving tenure, compared with 39 percent and 30 percent of tenured men in those respective disciplines.