Mothers in Academia

BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING WHILE BEING A MOTHER

Parenting, Teaching, Research, and Administration

Kim Powell

FROM THE BEGINNING of my academic career, I was determined to stay single and childless, which would allow me to have complete focus as I worked on my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees and become a faculty member at Luther College in 1992. My first three years at Luther were fully concentrated on teaching and research; my career was my life. I heard female faculty with children talk about the struggles of balancing work and home. They would say they could not attend evening events, something expected as part of the culture of a small liberal arts school, and at the time I believed their use of family as an excuse not to fulfill their faculty obligations was absurd. Little did I know that within a few years I would have a more personal understanding of family obligations and the implications of the barriers mothers face in the academy (Gee and Norton 2009).

The term glass ceiling was used in a 1986 Wall Street Journal article to describe the invisible barriers that women face as they move up in corporate organizations. Twenty years ago women could see the top positions in a company but were unable to reach them due to unwritten rules based on gender and the assumptions about gender-specific roles such as childbirth and motherhood. In this chapter, I argue that the glass ceiling is still very present, especially in the academy, as witnessed by my own academic trajectory and decision to become a parent. For mothers interested in moving up the administrative ladder, there is always the concern of how the demands of motherhood will match up with the public expectations of high-profile positions. The tight flexibility of such positions has unfortunately limited my move into higher-education administration, even despite my being invited to apply for deanships. Being a mother ultimately imposes restrictions on women professionally because the demands of the work are not consistent with the time and effort it takes to be a good mother and maintain sanity.

FROM SINGLE AND CHILDLESS TO MARRIED WITH CHILDREN

In 1995, I met and married my husband. Though I did not want to have children when I married, the sudden death of my father-in-law focused my attention on family and having a child. When my husband and I discussed growing our family, I wondered how this decision would be viewed, given it was early in my career and the majority of faculty at my college was older with fully grown children. I sought the advice of one of the few female full professors with children in my department. She advised me to plan my pregnancy for a summer birth and emphasized that to be a successful academic, my career needed to come first. She said, without apology, that her children knew her career came first and her family second. That struck me as sad for the children (and for her). Although I said nothing, I did not believe in choosing between career and family but would aim to achieve a balance because both were increasingly important to me.

I did heed my colleague’s advice about having a summer pregnancy because it is believed that having a child midsemester disrupts classes and needlessly burdens colleagues who have to step in to teach classes or find a replacement. Robin Wilson concurs: “It’s become an unwritten rule in academe that female professors who can manage it give birth between May and August” (1999), when students are not around. Following this rule, my husband and I perfectly planned my pregnancy so I would give birth the week after classes ended for spring semester in 1997. I would not have to miss any part of the academic year, I would not inconvenience my colleagues, and I would be able to focus on being a mother for the summer because I did not teach during those months. However, as I would learn repeatedly in the coming years of child rearing, children have their own plans. On February 28, just four weeks into spring semester, at twenty-eight weeks pregnant, I became ill with HELLP syndrome (hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low blood platelets) and was placed on bed rest. HELLP syndrome is a reaction to pregnancy that causes the mother’s body to experience liver failure, seizures, or even death if it is not caught early and monitored. Three days into bed rest, my condition became life threatening, and I was rushed to a hospital with a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for an emergency cesarean section. In early March, my daughter arrived at one pound, fifteen ounces, and spent seven weeks in the NICU, while I spent two days in intensive care and another three days in the hospital recuperating. Although my colleagues were very supportive, I was allowed only twenty-eight days of maternity leave, and only two of my classes were reassigned because the remaining third was a specialized course. At this small rural college, none of the local professors was qualified to teach my “Rhetorical Criticism” class. Therefore, despite being on maternity leave and recuperating from a cesarean, I taught the course via tape recorder soon after my daughter’s birth, then in my living room for several weeks, and finally at the college until the end of the semester. I was traveling three hours roundtrip daily to the hospital to see my daughter in the NICU, so my full concentration was split, and I could not focus on my own recovery or my baby’s; I was also grading papers and teaching a class required of our students to graduate. Thus, the struggle of being both mother and professor began.

By fall semester, I was back to teaching full time with my six-month-old daughter in day care. In retrospect, I wish I had been given more time to spend with her at home, yet getting a replacement for the fall semester proved to be difficult at my institution because no local adjuncts were available to teach my courses. In addition, part of my load was coaching and traveling with the college forensics team, which kept me away from home several weekends a year. Thus, if I wanted to keep my faculty position, I had to return to work full-time in the fall. It was necessary not only for my career, but also for my family economically. One solution that allowed me to adequately divide my attention between home and work was negotiating with the department head for a two-day-a-week teaching schedule. Challenging the traditional small college five-day schedule unfortunately resulted in some backlash from colleagues and students. Colleagues assumed I was not working as much as they were (though my teaching evaluations continued to be the highest in the department, as was my scholarly productivity), and some students said they could not find me in my office when they needed me (though I held as many office hours as my colleagues). These symptoms of the “maternal wall” (Porpora n.d.) are reactions stemming from assumptions that women with family are not or will not be as productive at work. Friends who were stay-at-home moms were also critical of my choice to continue my career because I didn’t meet their expectations of a “good mother”—that is, one who prioritizes her children rather than her own needs, desires, and career aspirations (Mottarella et al. 2009).

Regardless of the criticisms and challenges I faced daily, my identities as both professor and mother were important to my own happiness. In order for my child and me to be happy, to occupy the “happy mother–happy child position” (Swanson and Johnston 2003, 68), I needed to have an identity outside motherhood. And although research by Debra Swanson and Deirdre Johnston suggests that full-time working mothers are not as happy as part-time employed mothers, I did not want to give up my career. Being a part-time academic or leaving academia entirely was not an option for me, either financially or emotionally; therefore, finding happiness as a full-time professor and full-time mom was necessary. During hiring discussions, I unfortunately often heard comments about women taking time off for family reasons and then hiring committees later assuming that these women had been fired or had priorities in the wrong places. Within this academic landscape (Hornig 2003), it became not only desirable but also imperative that I carve out a space to be an effective mother and professor if I were to succeed at both.

REDEFINING ROLES AS PROFESSOR-MOM-RESEARCHER

In a faculty member’s early years in academia, administrators and tenured faculty have the unwritten expectation that the member will be wed to his or her work and labor tirelessly to meet tenure demands. The tenure clock’s overlap with childbearing years, as Cheryl Maranto and Andrew Griffin (2011) argue, is indicative of a preference in academia for workers without family responsibilities. This preference further solidifies a gendered glass ceiling because mothers may not advance as quickly as men or women without children. As Joan Williams argues, the ideal worker in academe is “someone who can move anywhere from Massachusetts to New Mexico, and can work like a fiend until tenure is granted—or denied—at around age 35” (2000). Furthermore, this ideal worker assumes an “open-ended time commitment of time, energy and personal resources” (Fothergill and Feltey 2003, 16). Giving birth while the tenure clock is ticking, however, is an interruption to academe’s “ideal worker,” of whom extensive research and publishing is expected. In my case, I had luckily met my publication requirements largely by the time my daughter was born one year before tenure review.

My research areas were political and social movement rhetoric, and although they were important topics, my areas of interest changed once my daughter was born. I redefined my academic practices in order to weave the personal with the scholarly. As my daughter watched Teletubbies and Barney, I studied gender depictions in children’s media. Because she was premature, I researched the effects of prematurity on parents and eventually edited a book titled Living Miracles: Stories of Hope from Parents of Premature Babies (Powell and Wilson 2000). Being in the interdisciplinary field of communication allowed for my life as a mom and researcher to be interwoven and intersectional. Yet balancing teaching, motherhood, and research as well as coaching and traveling with the forensics team became too much to handle. Two years after my daughter was born, I approached my department head and college dean to ask them if I could step away from forensics to better balance my home and work life. Although my department head was initially supportive, I later learned that in my tenure letter he questioned my loyalty to the college and also falsely stated that I had been hired to be a forensics coach and that my desire to step away from this position was a breach of contract. The dean was fortunately supportive of my multiple roles and supported my tenure and promotion to associate professor. It was a real possibility that without a supportive dean I would have been denied tenure because of my decision to reduce my load to better balance mothering and scholarly production. This process was a life-changing lesson regarding the glass ceiling in academia: unless female faculty members who are mothers have strong advocates in positions of power who value working parents, they are particularly in danger of not reaching the rank of tenured professor because their very presence challenges the status quo.

FROM PROFESSOR-MOM TO DEPARTMENT HEAD

After I received tenure, the two-day-a-week teaching schedule I held in my first semester after my daughter was born was changed to a four-day schedule due to the visibility expected of a professor on my small college campus. Although my career carried on fairly well, in 1998 I became department head with no course release, which was not a consistent practice on my campus. Teaching seven courses a year, serving as department head, and attending to committee assignments accentuated even more the difficulty of the balancing act between career and motherhood. Although my husband was supportive, he also had a full-time job, and, as is often the case (Collay 2002), the majority of family and child responsibilities fell on me as the mother and primary caretaker. The successful continuation of my career required that I rely on day care. As Tondra Loder (2005) found in a study of school principals who were also mothers, educators at all levels rely on paid day care in order for their careers to continue. The fact that my daughter attended a quality day-care center that I had faith in made my new responsibilities possible.

As my career became increasingly rewarding, so did the desire to add to our family. Because my first pregnancy resulted in HELLP syndrome and another pregnancy would be life-threatening, we turned to adoption as an excellent alternative. In 2001, my husband and I became foster parents with the intention to adopt, and that summer, perfectly timed for the academic year, we adopted a pair of sibling boys, ages one and three. Our new sons came to us with many emotional challenges and developmental delays, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. They had been neglected and abused in their birth home and had a great deal of anger they could not process or express verbally at their young ages. They would have screaming fits that could last an hour and would both lie and hoard. After three summer months of a challenging but rewarding adjustment, I returned to teaching full-time and used day care so that I could focus on work. As Swanson and Johnston have argued, “Full-time employed mothers try to justify their work decision by separating work and family spheres” (2003, 64). That is, in an ideal situation, while at work one thinks only of work, and while at home one thinks only of family. Although I was fairly successful at separating the spheres, the two once again melded in my scholarship as I researched the feelings of loss experienced by adult adoptees and the media representation of the U.S. foster-care system. An added advantage of straddling two spheres was that being a mother of children from challenging backgrounds made me a better, more empathetic teacher by enabling me to see each student as someone’s child with unique gifts and challenges.