Workplace Blog

Sacramento Bee: Younger professors make the grade

Just a few years ago, about half of Sacramento State’s full-time instructors had been teaching longer than most of their students had been alive.

That’s not the case today.

A sea change has taken place in the college’s faculty. Scores of instructors hired during a boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s have retired. They’ve been replaced by teachers half their age.

The trend means the university is losing more teachers like Henry Chambers, a history professor with 40 years on the job. He likes the enthusiasm and fresh knowledge that young instructors bring to the job but thinks it takes a while to learn a great deal about teaching and scholarship.

The Chronicle: Mommy Careerist: New Book Offers Advice for Academic Mothers on the Fast Track

By ROBIN WILSON

A dean who conducted a widely cited study showing that having children wreaks havoc on the careers of academic women has written a new book on how working mothers can raise children and hold high-pressure jobs.

The book, Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers, will be published next month by Oxford University Press. It was written by Mary Ann Mason, who is stepping down as dean of the graduate division at the University of California at Berkeley, and her daughter, Eve Mason Ekman, a medical social worker. Ms. Mason will go back to teaching and doing research in Berkeley’s Graduate School of Social Welfare.

Ms. Mason first published a study in 2002 that she called “Do Babies Matter?”

It provided the first national data on how professors with children fare in academe, and the news wasn’t good. Women who have babies within five years of earning a Ph.D., it found, are nearly 30 percent less likely than women without babies ever to snag a tenure-track position (The Chronicle, December 5, 2003).

In the new book, Ms. Mason and Ms. Ekman say it is common for women who start off in fast-track jobs in law, medicine, academe, and business to slip into the “second tier” once they have children.

Those jobs, they write, have fewer and more flexible hours, but do not pay as well and offer less responsibility. It is often difficult for women who slip into the second tier to make it back into the upper echelons of an organization.

Women who want to remain on the fast track after becoming mothers should stay in the game, taking off as little time as possible, says the new book. Those women also need supportive partners, in-home child care, and an ability to work on what the authors call “mother time.”

That means women must say no to evening meetings and lots of business travel, so they can have dinner with their children or attend the kids’ sporting events. But it also means going back to work after the kids are in bed.