Noreen O'Connor

Envisioning a New Parent Track in Academia
By Noreen O'Connor, assistant professor of English at King's College, Pennsylvania
As a recent graduate of a PhD program, a mother of two young children, and a newly hired tenure-track faculty member, I feel some survivor guilt when I read about women in the contingent faculty. Over 65 percent of faculty positions are now part-time and non-tenure-track appointments (Knapp et al. 2005), and women are disproportionately affected by this trend. While women are attending graduate schools and earning doctoral degrees in greater numbers than men, they hold significantly fewer full-time, tenure-track positions (McMahon and Green 2008). In fact, women are much more likely than men to hold part-time and contingent positions, what Martha S. West and John W. Curtis describe as “the least secure, least remunerative, and least prestigious jobs” in academia (9). As West and Curtis argued in 2006, “women face more obstacles as faculty in higher education than they do as managers and directors in corporate America” (4).

Judith M. Gappa		Andrea G. Trice

Rethinking Faculty Work and Workplaces for Women
By Judith M. Gappa and Andrea G. Trice
Women's representation in academe is steadily increasing. But as we both know firsthand, too many women find academe uninviting, particularly when raising a family. One of us encountered these issues as an administrator overseeing faculty employment, human relations, and equal opportunity in three different universities before becoming a full-time faculty member. The other, after experiencing the challenges of caring for two infants while on the tenure track, became an independent consultant so she could better manage her professional and family lives rather than continue to be dissatisfied with her performance in both. We also both know faculty who work off the tenure track in order to balance work and family responsibilities, but who find few opportunities for advancement and little respect from colleagues. Their stories remind us that many promising women with PhDs still see academe as an unattractive workplace.