HOWEVER, the other half of the problem is with the job. No job that wants 80 hours a week will ever be compatible with actual child rearing. The problem with professional careers is that you can always do more and get more prestige and honor for doing it. You always have to give up some prestige and honor if you want to do anything else but work.

Mothers and academics out there, does it matter whether you have 2 or 3 children? Is the ‘punishment’ the same, professionally speaking? Please share your experiences..I am hoping to have two, perhaps three, before I am 30 and have completed a post-doc..

Attributions that you are not serious if you are a mother are really irritating and are, I think, increasingly confined to people in male-dominated sexist-anyway professions and older men who had stay-at-home or otherwise supportive wives who are basically clueless or sexist or both.

The deeper problem even for the non-sexist younger generation is individual competition and the work-home nexus. The very most productive young scholars I know are either childless or are men with stay-at-home wives who take care of the home front. It is physically possible for the genders to be reversed in this and I know of a few cases of stay-at-home dads who act like wives, in the sense of really running the home front, but they are quite rare and have little impact on averages. I know many more cases where both partners try to share child/home duties relatively equally.

Unless you are willing to make it illegal for a person to choose to stay home with children and run the home front while her(his) spouse invests deeply in career, you are going to have these inequalities. I don’t think I’m willing to say that. Nor am I willing to demand that everyone have children whether they want to or not. There is a finite amount of time in a week and people make choices about how they allocate it.

Of course, workplaces dominated by men who have the home front run by their wives are going to be inhospitable places for anyone who is trying to spend a significant amount of time with children and contribute to running a home. We can opt into workplaces that are more dominated by people juggling the two, where we fit in better.

But trying to deal with this structurally seems hard. For professionals, our problem is not that we lack the resources to pay for child care and household help, it is that we don’t want to offload our child rearing entirely onto others. I realize that for grad students, the lack of money does impact choices, but it seems to me that there is a problem even when money is not an issue.

I have two young children, both of whom were born while I was in grad school. (I received my Ph.D. this past January, just a month shy of my youngest’s first birthday.) I was on the job market in 2007 and in 2006, when I was visibly (about 5.5 months) pregnant. I had the same thought process as NewSocProf — I was acutely aware of the potential for bias/discrimination based upon my pregnancy, but I figured that if a department didn’t want to hire me because I am a mother, then it would not be the supportive environment that I was looking for in the first place. As such, during my interviews I was always very open about being a mom — not that I had much choice the year I was pregnant! : ) Originally I really struggled with whether and to what extent to discuss my parenthood, but finally I decided that I wasn’t going to conceal who I am for the sake of potential employers, consequences be damned. In fact, I used faculty members’ reactions to my pregnancy/parenthood as kind of a litmus test for the departments I interviewed at. Of course, I can’t really know whether this strategy backfired or not (e.g., I have no way of knowing whether my being a mom was a deciding factor for search committees that voted not to extend me an offer), but I have never regretted being open about who I am and the realities of my family life.

All that said, I *did* have an older (mid-to-late 50s) male faculty member at one place I interviewed ask me, “So, you think you can manage being a schoolteacher with small children at home?” As you can probably imagine, I was utterly flabbergasted that he actually verbalized that thought to me.

One last thing: I agree that, despite the very real hurdles mothers in academia face, all in all it’s a pretty forgiving field when compared to other professional environments. Like many of you, its relative compatibility with parenthood was a big reason why I pursued an academic career to begin with.