Better and Worse Ways of Managing Work and Family?

 Baby G. finds herself in day care starting this week, and I've decided that I'll be heading over there 3 times a day or so to nurse, at least through the summer.  I suspect some of the people at day care and at my work place think I'm crazy, judging by the looks I've gotten.  I appear to be too attached to my kid, perhaps?  Or not attached enough if I'm putting her in day care?  Either way, I appear to lose and maybe, on some accounts, so does Baby G.  But I have to say I myself think I've got a pretty good hybrid situation going on: someone else changes the poopy diapers while I write my book, and I get to take breaks by sitting in a rocking chair and nursing.  At least initially, this arrangement is seeming like a good compromise in the whole thorny work/family balance issue.

I was speaking to graduate students yesterday about this very issue, so I thought I'd post those remarks here and see what conversation ensues.  Is my apparent "balance" the best thing?  Are there other ways to balance this?  Is balance even possible?  One of my colleagues also speaking yesterday mentioned that she thinks there's no such thing as balance - that word implies that there are scales all equally weighted down.  In reality, she says, some days are more work and some days more family needs.  So read and please weigh in!

Men and women both have always had to find ways to juggle work – as in putting food on the table – with family. That’s called real life.  Work and family are simply part of life.In this era when we think of work chiefly as something we do away from home, and raising family as something we do at home - of course I think there are better and worse ways of finding a work/family balance.  I’m an ethicist after all.

 One of the reasons I first started thinking about academia in the first place was because I saw my undergraduate professors being moms and academics and I thought, this looks like a good gig.  My undergraduate adviser, a medieval historian, had two kids and was clearly very involved in their school and activities.  In fact, I remember doing a project for one of her courses that involved developing a medieval history program for her daughter’s class at school.  And, I thought that it must be great to have a job where you have the summers “off” to spend time with your kids.   My undergraduate mindset was a bit naïve, especially regarding summers off, but I’ll get to that a bit more later in my talk.

Later on, while doing doctoral work at Duke University, I came across professors who were waging a protest against what they saw as an established effort to separate work and kids too much.  Duke is an R1 institution – meaning it is highly research oriented – so that faculty always feel pressure to publish, even when they’re not at the office.  I remember one of my professors putting it this way: “I feel like I have to choose between baking chocolate chip cookies with my kids or working on my book.”  I thought that was really sad and so did they – and it helped that this was a theological institution, and so they thought that particularly a place concerned about Christian life and church ought to be more concerned about children and their parents.  So they began to protest a bit – one professor brought her adopted young baby with her when she taught her classes, until the baby was about a year old.  Other professors petitioned for, and got, a paternity leave policy complete with stopping the tenure clock.

So all of these encounters with other people trying to balance work and family in academia helped me figure out how I wanted to try to balance things in my own life.  Following, in no particular order, are some of the things you will probably want to consider as you finish your doctoral work and make it into the wide world of academia:

1.      Consider carefully the kind of school you want to work at.  Most people do doctoral work at research institutions like Duke, and research institutions tend to try to perpetuate their own. Thus it can seem like research, research, research is the best way to go.  That’s just not necessarily so.  If you love research, then go for it – but just know that if part of your goal has also been to live out in the country in a big house, do organic gardening and raise eight kids, you’re probably going to need to hire a lot of help. 

For my own part, initially I thought that I wanted to teach at a small liberal arts school, which is where I had my first job.  I looked specifically for jobs that seemed to be good places to raise a family.  My first job was at a lovely liberal arts college, small, and community-centered.  Its faculty frequently entertain each other at their homes and it’s the kind of place where faculty feel free to bring their kids who are on school vacation and their dogs to work. They have one of the best maternity leave policies in the country – a full semester paid, with no teaching or other duties.  When I interviewed there, the committee, as well as many other people, made particular points to bring up their families, where the best schools were, what day care options there were, and the like.  Those were all indications to me that here was a place I wanted to work, because here was a place I could envision having a satisfying life that included both my vocation and my family

2.      Now I was lucky.  I had a few job offers on my first go-round in the job market, so for me, I had a choice, and I made my decision on the basis of family friendly policies.  But I recognize that academics don’t always have choices about the schools they’ll work for.  Which brings me to my second recommendation: when you land a job, negotiate a contract that is family friendly.  Check out a school’s website and see if you can find their maternity policy.  If you can’t, learn to ask veiled questions about “leaves” when you get to your on campus interview to see if can learn more.  If the maternity leave policy is non-existent (which is the case at a surprising number of schools, even though the lack of a maternity leave policy is illegal) – or if the maternity leave policy is meager at best, negotiate for a full semester off from teaching.  It’s healthier for both you and your baby.  For men, negotiate paternity leave, especially if your wife is planning to go back to work.  Negotiate a reduced course load even if you can’t get a full semester off. 

And always, always, negotiate for stopping the tenure clock. Having leave is not enough: taking care of a baby full time means you really don’t have time to do research or service, both of which count in getting tenure.  By stopping the tenure clock, you push back getting tenure by another semester or a year, but that’s often (though not always) to your advantage.

One of the things I negotiated too, was my husband’s job.  We had decided we’d go wherever one of us got a job, and try to negotiate for the other one.  It’s key in trying to maintain family balance when you’ve got young children– because we didn’t want a situation where we were working on opposite sides of the country. 

3.      And the final tip I’ll share here is: academia is always a pressure cooker.  You’ve got to take your own breaks and not apologize for them. This is how my undergraduate self was naïve about summer vacation – the dirty secret is that faculty aren’t really “off” in the summer.  They’re catching up on the review essay they promised a publisher, or teaching a class to try to earn a bit more money, or working on the book or articles so they can get tenure, and so on.  The pressure to keep going and going never quits, even at a teaching school.  At my first school, there was some pressure to apply for faculty research grants in the summer because having good faculty who do premier research is one of the ways a small school keeps its name known. 

One thing I discovered pretty quickly,though, was that I truly enjoy doing research and so I made a move to work at a bit more of a research-oriented institution with a master’s and doctoral program.  It’s not as high-powered as Duke, which is good.  I realized early on that I don’t want to work at a Duke or a Harvard or a Notre Dame.  So I moved here – and I immediately became even busier, what with master’s and doctoral committee work, and MORE research requests from publishers, in addition to the pressure to give our doctoral program a good name by being a good researcher and teacher myself.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in that, and sometimes I get caught up too much I think.  But here’s what I aim to do – I aim to leave my work at the office, or at least not touch my computer or work till the kids are in bed, once I am at home.  I take my kids to my academic conferences and I bring them to my office when I’ve got to.  I keep my weekends as free as possible for hanging out with my family.  I don’t go to as many evening functions as I would if I did not have a family.  I miss out sometimes on meeting some great people – and it may, in some corners, also mean I don’t get to “advance” in my field as quickly.  But I think that’s part of life.  So to go back to what I said at the beginning: I don’t think I ‘have it all.’  I’ve made some choices over others and that affects both the job I seek and the family life I can have.  My priority is finding a way to make this academic work that I am called to do – being a theologian – go along with the other work I am called to do – be a wife and mother.  It’s not like one of those is more part of who I am than the other. 

Academic Job Search IV - Making it On Campus

For other posts in this series:
Beginning a search  Networking    First Interview           Contract       Rejections

A call for an on campus interview requires a bit of a mental shift in thinking.  It is now about a 1 in 3 chance that this could be your future employer, so for the on campus interview consider that you're checking THEM out just as much as they're continuing to check you out.  I understand that you will feel like you've got to take the job if offered because it's THE option you have but you at least need to make sure that it's a place you can make work somehow, even if it's not quite the location/job type (more teaching over research or vice versa) you're looking for.

Actually, location and job type are much easier to deal with than some other things you might encounter....

Consider the Following Examples:

School A) School A invites you for a 2 day job interview and promises to reimburse travel.  The chairperson of the hiring committee also tells you you'll be receiving a packet of helpful information in the mail.  Your on campus interview consists of a teaching presentation before an actual class and a research presentation, and the chairperson asks you to prepare your teaching presentation based on the readings the students are doing.  The research presentation will be done before a variety of faculty members and is to be on your current research.

When you arrive at school A, you are immediately greeted by the chairperson and given the full schedule.  There is someone available to walk you to and from each place you must visit, and your schedule includes meetings with the president, the dean, and a representative from human resources.  You will also meet with students at a variety of times.  On all of the nights you will be there, the department is providing meals.  One dinner is with junior faculty, and one of the lunches is with a group of women faculty so that you can ask questions particular to these groups of people. In some cases, you may even be given "housing" or "town" tours so you can get a sense of the kind of living options in the area.

This is the ideal on-campus interview (And I am happy to say, really is the norm.  The vast majority of on campus interviews I've had were like this....).  This is a school that knows you're checking them out as much as they're checking you out, and they're giving you every opportunity to find out as much as you can about them.  One of the big reasons is that they don't want to have to do another job search for your position any time soon.

So in preparation for all of this, you need to be sure you have questions set up for each available constituency you'll meet. (You will, also, always be fielding the same questions you had at your first round interview about teaching, research and how you see yourself fitting into institutional aims):

President/Provost:  Where do you see the institution in five years?  How does the department of ________ fit in to this institution's aims?  What are some of the goals you have in mind for the humanities/social sciences/sciences division of the school? (For the dean specifically: What are the tenure procedures?)

Chairperson of the Department (May or may not be the same as the chairperson of the hiring committee): What will I be expected to teach and how often?  (Very Very Important)... Will I be able to teach a course occasionally that relates to my research?  What are some of the department's goals?  What are the procedures for getting tenure?Are there opportunities for faculty to meet and share research?  How often are there department meetings?  Are there opportunities for interdepartmental collaboration? Is this a new tenure line or am I replacing someone? 

Senior Faculty:  What are the students like?  What kind of direction do you see/do you want to see the department take?  What do you like about working at this institution?

Junior Faculty (who will have been at the school 6 years or less) :  How have you liked working here?  What are the students like?  What are the housing options here?  What kinds of activities do people do here?  (If in  a small town, you might ask if people live in the nearest large city and commute, or if they travel there quite a bit....)  Do you have any advice for settling in?

Undergraduate students: What do you like about the department? What led you to come to this school?  What do you like studying?

Human Resources: (NB: Before going to your on campus interview, check out the average salary of your institution for your department and rank at the helpful AAUP website...)  What is the process for requesting a leave here? (Note the singular, non-specific leave: this covers all kinds of leaves, including family leave, short term and long term disability leave, as well as personal leave and sabbatical leave)   How often are sabbatical leaves offered?  What other benefits I can expect?  NB: You probably won't need to ask any of these questions of the HR person (because they're usually a bubbly, outgoing, cram-every-piece-of-possible-paper-in-your-hand kind of person) unless you have no meeting with a human resources person.  In that case, ask these questions of the chairperson of your department.



School B)  School B  invites you for a job interview in a far away city sot that you must take a plane to get there.  They promise to reimburse plane far but "could you possibly pick up the shuttle to the airport?"  You do so and arrive at the hotel with no one to greet you and an entire evening and morning to while away (because the interview doesn't start till noon....)  The interview itself is short: it consists of three hours with a hiring committee and a couple hours meeting with students.  You do not meet with the president, provost, or human resources person and when you ask standard questions like "What is the average salary?" they reply (rather abruptly) that you can't get that information until you've been offered a position. 

What do we know about this school from reading between the lines?
1. It may have some financial difficulties, evidenced by the fact that they've not really been hosting you beyond the barest requirements and this is really quite a short on campus interview for a tenure track line.   (If it were a temporary or adjuncting position, this is more standard.)  You should therefore wonder if there will be leaves available at all, or whether you'll have to ration copies or other office supplies.  You should also wonder if you'll be overworked: will your contract require more of you than salary or time allow?  Will you be viewed as mostly a working person with no outside life?

2. This kind of interview should make you wonder what faculty collaboration is really like.   Is your department kind of a pariah at this school?  The lack of access to human resource personnel or to faculty in other departments should make you wonder, in a negative way.

3.  They're not thinking about you and your needs.  They're not giving you enough information to make an informed decision about the school.  Will you therefore be seen as a number, as insignificant?  Too hard to tell.

If School B ends up being your only offer, you will want to consider carefully how to negotiate your contract to make this as liveable a situation as possible for you in the long term.  This is the kind of school you may be plotting to get as far away from as soon as possible, but if that proves difficult, the initial contract negotiations will be imperative.

School C)  School C invites you for a fully paid on campus interview much like School A's.  One of the key differences that is immediately apparent, though, is that School C asks for an on campus interview in an email - to ALL the other candidates as well.

When you arrive on campus, you are met by wonderful people - who immediately apologize for the town, the school and the people. In the course of the interview questions you ask, you discover that WHILE having a 4-4 course load, the school also expects the person in this new position to do plenty of research ("to lead us toward R1 status) and to run a new "institute" on campus that is newly funded by an anonymous donor.

What do we know about this school?
1)  It is characterized by unprofessionalism.  This is not necessarily a deal breaker, but you might wonder whether the way things get done at this school is by round about means, via old boy networks. 

2) There is a lack of good administration at this school. The administration is clueless about faculty needs and abilities.  They are expecting quite a lot out of their candidate, and especially one that they know comes straight from graduate school.  This is going to be information that comes in especially handily when it comes to negotiating a contract.

3) We might also wonder about financial difficulties, instead of or in addition to administrative problems.  While this institution is not clearly in dire straits, the fact that they're already piling on duties (4-4 course load along with running an institute) suggests that they do not have the ability to hire the personnel they need.  You'll probably be overworked at this school.

To Sum it Up....

The questions asked of you are similar to the ones from the first round, though you will have time to deepen your answers.  Where your real work is, however, is in the questions you ask and the things you intuit.  This will help you immeasurably in determining what to do when it comes time for contract negotiations should they offer you a job.


Special for Women and Moms:

1. I have gotten mixed advice over the years on whether to ask directly about maternity leave, or whether to just be vague: "What is your leave policy?"  These days, I would probably ask directly, but depending on the situation, might ask it more of women faculty themselves.  Alternatively, do an internet search to see if you can find a copy of the maternity leave policy and if you can't find one, be prepared to ask for that in contract negotiations.

2. If the hiring committee doesn't arrange a meeting with faculty women for you, you might request a coffee with someone if there's down time at all.  (There usually isn't down time in these things, but if they ask you what you want, you might think about this.)  Such a meeting is a good time to ask questions about women to men ratio, whether they feel like they're "always" being asked to be on committees because they're women (an important clue to how overworked you may or may not feel) and whether the campus is mom-friendly.

3.  What if you're pregnant?  I think the same applies as in the first round interviews.  If you're past the time you can travel, I'm not sure what you might do.  There is always an option for virtual conferencing.  Anyone out there had the experience of being pregnant while on campus?

4.  What if you're breastfeeding?  Ah, well, I have a story about this. Having given birth to a premature baby who had JUST transitioned to breastfeeding from bottle feeding, I did not think I could leave my baby at home during a two day interview.  So I discussed it with the hiring committee chairperson and opted to bring the baby, PLUS my husband (at my expense) so that he could keep an eye on her.  I also petitioned for time to pump/breastfeed in between interview activities, which is very important.  (See here for a totally different story about breastfeeding and the on campus interview.)   The fact of my baby and her needs made me more direct at this point than I would have been at other times in the interview process, but this is partly to point out how distinctive the on campus round really is.  At this point, they really want to get to know you better, so you have a bit more leeway, PERHAPS

I think that you have think about the situation as a whole - recognize that having family there at the interview is not ideal by a long shot, but it MAY be necessary at points.  Most of the time, though, I'd not bring the family and ask about "down time" on the schedule - then use that time to pump.

Being Truthful about Being Human: or, "Having it All" Revisited

I apologize for the blog break.  Last Saturday, I attended a symposium with other theologians, and I spent last week writing the paper for that symposium.  It went well, by the way, and I really enjoyed it.  It also makes me think, once again, about the whole concept of working mothers "having it all."

I took the whole family with me to the town where the symposium was - actually, THAT fact was more Philosophy PhD's choice, since he 1) wanted to make sure that I made the 3 hour trip okay by myself (which meant him coming with me); 2) wanted to get out of town; 3) was maybe ever so slightly worried about being alone with L. for a whole day (?).  I'm guessing here.  In any case, they all came with me.

Baby G. actually went with me to the symposium, too.  Most of the time, that's a big "no-no" in academia, especially if you're presenting.  At least, I haven't generally felt welcome to do that.  But when I was asked to present a paper, I was already 7 months pregnant, and knew that in February there WOULD, God willing, be a baby to show for it all.  I also knew that I wanted to nurse the baby and therefore knew that my being away from her for a full night plus a whole day would likely not work.  (She does take a bottle here and there, convenient for quick meetings and such...but a whole day and night?  Philosophy PhD responsible for the feeding and care of a 3 year old plus an infant?  I'm sure he would have balked.)  Frankly, I'm not sure if even she were solely a bottle-taking baby, I would have left her for that long at 2 months old.  I suppose that's one of those "your mileage may vary" things, highly dependent on the parent and the baby.  At 7 months pregnant, you have no idea what kind of baby you'll have nor how you'll feel.  And, given that the baby could conceivably have come at any point up to January 11, when they would have induced for post-term pregnancy, the symposium could have been only a month after the baby was born.  All those caveats.  Despite it all, they kept their invitation open and I decided, why not?  It sounded like a fun symposium, and this is one of the several reasons I went into academia - to think about topics with other theologians!

The symposium planners and people were fantastic!  They welcomed the baby; one of the participants walked my baby around while I gave my paper (he totally didn't have to do that) and generally it went well, at least from my point of view.  (I don't know about theirs....)  But the fact is, I wouldn't have gone at all if I couldn't have brought her.  It was my sine qua non.

But I want to add still further to the reflection on all this.  I was one of only two women in the room, and the only woman with young children.  Actually, that's rather common both in my field and in academia in general.  There are a few fields that have more women than men, but for the most part, that's not the case.  The men there were all family guys themselves, so quite understanding about issues with kids - but still, there's a gender thing there.  I'm the only one who has breasts, to put it bluntly.  Whatever my brand of feminism at other times and places (I tend to favor post-modern feminism), in situations like this, I seem most like a cultural feminist, because there IS something to their idea that women have undervalued attributes like breasts.

This is especially so in the workplace.  It's one of the reasons why I am angry about this country's maternity leave policies, because the underlying view seems to be that, "Oh, OKAY.  We'll hire a woman, but after she's hired, she has to pretend that she doesn't have a uterus, breasts, children to pick up from school, or anything else that leaks 'family'."  (And let's not make this a those-Europeans versus these-Americans thing, since that seems to devolve into cross-ocean name-calling and discussions of who is most/least responsible when it comes to the national budget. For example, I was speaking to a friend in Uganda last week, where the national policy is three months...)

The standard of pretending one doesn't have a family belongs to a time when men could pretend that they could arrive at work and appear unconnected to family life precisely because they didn't have bodies that betray otherwise.  Well, I think partly because women have been in the workplace for a while, that attitude has been changing/changed for a while too.  Lots of men now proclaim themselves as family men and leave meetings to pick up kids early.  Our maternity leave policy is SO nineteenth-century - and while we're at it, the lack of a paternity leave policy is SO twentieth-century.

So let's be truthful about ourselves.  We are a people who work and who have families, even if we're not married with children.  That doesn't mean "having it all."  That's a statement about the way humans exist - and have existed for a long time.  Let's break away from the false ideals from the mid- to late- nineteenth century and post-World War II about women and men and families.  People have long been merchants with families, farmers with families, restaurateurs with families, etc.  Work wasn't always imagined as cordoned off from one's family life.  I think it is largely because we started to imagine a space called "the office" that family got pushed to the wayside - but that's too straitjacketed a way to live.

Having such a hugely separate place called "work" or "the office" is too great a luxury for us, I think.  I know my detractors will say, "But children are too distracting," and actually, I agree with them.  I'm a big fan of well-paid child care, but I also think there are many times when we are too quick to say that children don't belong.  Like, for instance, at academic meetings where for many participants, the main things aren't the papers but getting together over beers to discuss their field.  I do, in fact, judge academic meetings by how welcoming they are to children.  Society of Christian Ethics: excellent.  Other rarefied societies of which I am/have been a part?  Not so much.

Overall, we need better work policies in terms of hours, flexibility and the like.  We need to be able to be fully human, fully with families and also fully participants in the economy.  To pretend that we are machines or just individual objects in space, unconnected to each other, isn't realistic or good.

Just as a related aside: while I was on partial bedrest during pregnancy, I watched the entire series of "House, M.D."  (Never seen it before.)  Anyone else ever notice that ALL of the characters on the show have failed marriages, no children, no spouse, even no significant other (unless married to each other)?  There's an interesting underplot about work becoming family if you make it to high enough/rare enough ranks.  And obviously, the "best" doctors can't be ordinary, or mingle with the ordinary - that is to say, people with families.  It's kind of life marriages in Hollywood: can't associate with the plebs, because it "just won't work."