05.29.08
disillusioned
Disillusioned commented about her concern with FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act)* in academia:
I am in a non-tenure track position and when I told my chair I wanted to take FMLA I was told that he or she didn’t think it applied to me because I’m in a non-tenured position. This was quickly followed up with, “I helped write this university’s maternity leave policy. You should have seen it before.” I qualifed for FMLA. I know the law well (as does this chair) and had already discussed it with HR.
It is very annoying when people who are in supervisory positions make statements about policies without being correct. Many employees depend solely upon these people to know and are not as well educated about the law as D is.
I am also growing disillusioned by my field. Why are we patting academia on the back for extending the tenure clock one additional year for each child (this is not policy at all universities)? Why should I have less job security over a longer period of time because I’ve chosen to become a parent? These are people that know better (they understand the mommy penalty). Academia might be a “better” fit with parenthood than other careers but I’m growing less sure of that every day.
I’m not very familiar with the extension of the tenure track, but I thought it was more of an option that something that would definitely happen. Also, I thought that it was for the year after childbirth, when one might not be as productive. The way D puts it though, it’s as if because I have two kids, even though they’ll be like 8 and 6 when I enter the job market, my tenure clock will be extended. I don’t think I’d want that – it would be unnecessary and imposes a stereotype on mothers that may not apply. Are there others out there who have more experience with this? Is it an option? Does it apply to all mothers, regardless of the age of the child(ren)? Do people see it as a good thing or a bad thing?
I am also finishing up my doctorate and am growing frustrated over having to censor myself on social networking sites on the chance that potential employers (or my current employer) stumble upon my postings. I’m jealous of my non-academia mom friends that can post an ultrasound photo as their profile photo. I’m nervous posting it anywhere on my profile even though the profile is private, excluding the profile photo and headline.
If I were you, I wouldn’t hold that part of me back. If there is an institution that, after reviewing your dissertation, teaching portfolio, etc. that would not want to hire you because you have a child, then why would you want to work for them? I think it’s best to be straight-up in the hiring process because then everyone knows what they are getting. I also do not ever hide my kids when I don’t want to. My kids are all over my facebook page, I talk about them in my blurb on my department’s website, and I definitely plan to have more and talk about them, too.
My husband has also run into problems at his non-academic job. He is taking their paid parental leave and his boss told him he didn’t think he qualified because he isn’t the primary caregiver. What is a primary caregiver? He is no more or no less the primary caregiver than me.
Again, annoying. Although I sent my husband back to work after a week – I couldn’t take it 
FMLA may be law but in practice intimidation is used inside and outside of academia to discourage workers from taking it.
You should read the work of these scholars at the ABF. They found exactly what you are talking about – employers using retaliation and intimidation to discourage workers from mobilizing their rights.
* In a nutshell, FMLA provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave for employees who have worked in their firm for more than a year at a firm who has over 100 employees. The real benefit of FMLA is job security – upon return to work, an employees must be restated at the same or better position than before the leave began. And the leave is not just for pregnancy – all medical issues with someone in the immediate family are covered.
carly said,
May 29, 2008 at 4:39 pm
As far as I understand it at most universities, you only get a tenure clock extension if you have a child while working there and untenured. Also, sometimes I think you can choose to be evaluated at the “normal” time if you want to, though I’m not sure about that.
olderwoman said,
May 30, 2008 at 5:32 am
What Carly says is true of my institution. A tenure clock extension is available to a person of either sex after the birth or adoption of a child, but you have to apply for it, it does not happen to you automatically and it does not happen upon hire for people who already have children. It is legal in our institution for both parents to get the extension. In my department, it is pretty routine and there is no stigma attached to getting the extension. There are other departments on campus that are rumored to be more hostile to it.
There is also a big debate about whether getting the extension means you have to stay untenured an extra year, or whether it should be treated as an optional extension that is used only if you need it. My department has the latter view, but others at the divisional level take the former view. Why/how this matters: many think the criteria for early tenure should be substantially higher than the criteria for normal tenure. So whether your case is considered normal or early tenure affects how it is evaluated by people with this opinion. I think you should evaluate a case in whatever way is most favorable to the candidate, but a feminist colleague argues that this is dangerous and will lead to an erosion of the extension; she says you have to treat the extension year as a real extension (i.e. pushing the whole review calendar back a year) for everyone or it will not really help the women who take it and need it.
Some schools now give assistant professors a semester of full pay with no teaching after the birth or adoption of a child. Not us, but we are trying to get that.
gradmommy said,
May 30, 2008 at 7:07 am
“Why/how this matters: many think the criteria for early tenure should be substantially higher than the criteria for normal tenure.” OW, I’m not sure what you mean by this. If the “normal” tenure clock is about 7 years, what is “early” tenure? Or are you saying that, after the birth/adoption of a child, “early” tenure is the regular time (seven years) and normal would be eight years?
Contradicting what I said earlier, I do think that after the birth/adoption of a child, all affected parents should be required to take the extra year to tenure. I think your feminist colleague is correct – those who take it may be stigmatized, and more often than not, it will be the women, vs. the men (except perhaps in same-sex couples) who take the extension. This makes it into more of a “mommy” extension rather than a “parent” extension. Only think though is that it might not matter – if men are not equal partners at home, then that extra year may make them even more productive than their female counterparts.
oblion said,
June 1, 2008 at 1:33 pm
what a great post!
With the FLMA… i don’t think b/c someone is non-tenure does that mean the FLMA does not apply. As graduate students we were under the assumption we did not get “maternity leave” b/c we were semester contractual employees, until a person who studies it, found out differently.
Also I agree with what you wrote about the censoring stuff… I was afraid of this before, but have came to be comfortable with my decision to blog.
olderwoman said,
June 1, 2008 at 3:21 pm
“I do think that after the birth/adoption of a child, all affected parents should be required to take the extra year to tenure.”
This would discriminate against parents relative to non-parents, and there would be a great outcry among many assistant professors. Things are not that simple.
Let me explain it this way. First you need to know how tenure works. AAUP rules say that if you are employed as a professor more than 7 years, you have tenure. So departments make an “up or out” decision by the end of the 6th year at the latest. If you are denied tenure in the 6th year, you have one more year of employment during which you can look for a job. AAUP rules do not prohibit early tenure. People with exceptional records can be tenured in fewer years, and it is not uncommon for one school to try to “raid” a rising star from another school by offering early tenure. Schools differ in their rules about early tenure. At my school, tenure after 5 years is considered “ordinary early” for someone with a record that obviously merits tenure, while there is great resistance to giving tenure before 5 years unless it is necessary to counter an outside offer. Cases that go to the 6th year for a decision are the borderline cases for whom tenure is not a slam dunk, although many people get tenure in the 6th year.
My department does not have simple counting formulas (we evaluate quality and impact of work, not just how much there is), but many departments do have quantitative tenure standards, and it is easier to explain the issues that way. Suppose a department says that you get tenure for 10 peer-reviewed articles plus a good record of teaching and service. (Another rule common in “book” departments is that you get tenure if you publish a book with a good press.) At some schools with this kind of rule, if you get your 10 articles (or your book) published within four or five years, then you get tenure in four or five years. The logic is that you have done what you need to do to get tenure, so you deserve it.
This is why trying to figure out how to handle tenure clock extensions is so hard in any system that permits early tenure. If you need the extra time to get tenure, you should get it, and that is what the extension is for. But if you have done what you need to do in less time despite having a child, then (the logic goes) you should get the tenure early. It isn’t fair to make you wait just because you had a child.
This is not to deny the power of the other line of argument that you developed. It is (I think) that there is no easy way to balance these competing logics of fairness.
gradmommy said,
June 2, 2008 at 5:15 am
Hmm…when I said that all affected parents should be required to do XYZ, I was thinking about mothers vs. fathers. So in the case when there is not a tenure “clock”, say when publishing X number of articles is the criteria, then extending the clock doesn’t make sense. It’s not really “early” tenure, right, because time is not really a factor – it’s about when you get the work done.
But in cases when it’s about time, I think to be fair to women who have children you have to require that men who have children are subject to the same “penalty”. What if there are two assistant professors who will be judged more qualitatively, one male and one female, and both have a child at some point during their assistant professorship. Men who have children are consistently seen as “better” than their non-father colleagues for being able to perform “in spite” of having children. Women on the other hand, who are bearing most of the child care responsibilities, oftentimes cannot perform as well as their non-mother colleagues and are penalized for that. The extra time on the tenure clock corrects for the parent vs. non-parent bias somewhat, but the comparison between mothers and fathers still remains. If women almost always (and I’m not sure this is the case) take the extension if it is offered, then the fair thing to do would be to make all parents take the extension. It kind of gets back to the motherhood penalty stuff.