Winter 2004

Volume 33
Number 2

Balancing Act

The Institutional Will to Change
By Yolanda T. Moses
University of California, Riverside

In 2004, four years into the twenty-first century in the most affluent country in the world, our academic institutions still have woefully inadequate work/life policies. For example, Mary Ann Mason's recent study, "Do Babies Matter?," looks at correlations between faculty success and parenthood and shows that women with children do not get tenure at the same rate as men (with or without children). Further, if women stop out of the academy to have children, they will probably never catch up with their male counterparts.

What is it going to take for institutions to have the will to change the policies and the culture to value the role of parent in the academic workplace? My answer is that it will take both bold policies and bold leadership. Without clear policies, individual faculty are left to devise ad hoc solutions. But without clear leadership, even good policies are ineffective.

Leadership Without Policy
In 1976, a strong female department chair protected me, then a young professor, from the dean and the male faculty in my department when I decided to have my first child before I had tenure. In my case, there were no policies in place for maternity leave nor did the tenure clock stop for women faculty. Fortunately, I was able to work until the end of the spring quarter, and I had my daughter in July and returned to work in September. But for the next year, my department chair arranged for me to teach in the late afternoons and evenings so that I could spend my days with my daughter. My husband took over when he got home from work in the evenings. This enlightened woman had set her career aside for her husband's career, raised her own children, and had gotten her Ph.D. late in life. She was determined to help women in her department. While commendable and helpful to me, it was far short of the overall institutional support that women needed then--and still need now.

Policy Without Leadership
In the 1980s, the California State University system developed polices allowing women to take unpaid maternity leaves when their six-week disability insurance ran out. My second child was born in 1980, and it was a nightmare to figure out how to make all of these policies work. What's more, I resented the fact that my pregnancy was treated like a disability when it clearly was not! Once again, pregnancy was treated as if somehow this was something that the individual woman had to figure out, and any necessary accommodations had to be figured out by the individual.

It was not until I became an academic dean in that same institution that could I push the administration to be clear about the policy because there were women who did not even know that they were entitled to unpaid maternity leave. I made that information known in my college. I also encouraged our department chairs to foster a climate where women were not made to feel guilty or marginalized because they were pregnant and had to do things differently than some of the men. Indeed, many of the women who secretly came to talk with me felt as though they were being held hostage by their departments who were not giving them any leeway in terms of scheduling or the tenure process.

In the 1990's, as a chief academic officer, I saw first hand the impact of so-called neutral family leave policies in the tenure and promotion process. While women could take a leave to have children, the tenure clock was not stopped unless women faculty petitioned for it. Many of them did not because, when they did, it became a blemish or a stigma on their record. Instead, they often tried to be "wonder women," burning the candle at both ends. Or they resigned themselves to the fact that, once tenured, they would probably linger in the associate professor ranks longer than their male counterparts. This again relegated them to a secondary position, vis-à-vis their male counterparts. Many of these women became excellent teachers and were happy with a teaching/research mix. Nonetheless, because the institution did not promote its own stop-the-clock policy, it put the burden on the individual woman to make her case and scramble to keep up with a very traditional career model that still only gave lip service to the value of parenthood.

Putting Leadership and Policy to Work
When I moved across country to become president of an east coast university, I thought that there would be a bit more sophistication and understanding of family leave policies since the institution was so esteemed in other ways. But that was not the case. Yes, there was a family leave policy in place for both women and men, but the stigma was there as well. The faculty understood why women had to take maternity or family leave, but they did not understand why men did. I remember one particular case in which a department made the faculty member feel guilty about wanting to actually take advantage of the policy. He was grudgingly given the leave, but the assumption was that he was not serious about his career.

My role as an institutional leader was to support these policies and to make sure that people who took advantage of our policies were not penalized in the process. In addition, our family leave policies for both men and women were for staff as well as faculty. Our institution was a highly unionized environment, and, in this case, the unions arranged educational workshops so that employees at all levels understood the benefits. Supervisors and directors can often be the same kind of gatekeepers as senior faculty or department chairs when it comes to understanding policies and practices that privilege parenting and caring in the workplace.

Transforming Institutions Through Policy and Leadership
What can we do as leaders in higher education to finally change the institutional structures so that we recognize and value the fact that our employees are well-rounded and caring parents and caregivers? I would like to suggest three things:

1. Leaders and their institutions must develop policies that recognize that the life/career cycle of women and men faculty and staff are different and then develop more flexible frameworks to value and honor that reality.

2. Leaders and their institutions must develop and support stop the tenure clock policies for both women and men, thus encouraging more men to take advantage of family leave policies and making it more than a woman's issue.

3. Leaders and institutions must value multiple paths to tenure for faculty including multiple forms of scholarship, teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (see Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered).

The National Initiative for Women in Higher Education has identified Work/Life issues as one of the major cornerstones of its work. We will continue to promote and share policies and practices that recognize family-friendly policies on campuses. Since the majority of Americans do live in and are nurtured by their families and their communities, it is important that the academy learns how to do more than grudgingly accommodate that fact. Without bold institutional leadership, the burden of success too often falls on the shoulders of individual women, rather than on the institution and its policies. The extent to which we are effective is the extent to which the people who work in our institutions will be more loyal and effective employees. A win-win situation for all of us, I believe.