Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?

Numerous reports and accounts suggest that balancing parenthood and academic careers can be difficult, particularly for women. Two new studies suggest that, possibly as a result, many female academics may be opting not to have kids.

One study compares female academics to those in other professions that have substantial training time and finds professors far less likely to procreate. The other study, in anthropology, finds male anthropologists more likely to have children than are their female counterparts — and finds significant evidence that women in academe (even in a discipline not seen as promoting outdated gender roles) find their careers limited by responsibilities at home.

The study comparing professions tracks recent household “birth events” (having a child aged zero or one) in households of physicians, lawyers, and academics — with the thinking being that all three professions require many years of training and long work hours to succeed. The study, based on 2000 Census data, finds that academics are the least likely to have experienced recent birth events, and that the gap is greatest for women. (Physicians are most likely to have had children recently, and lawyers are in the middle.)

Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children. When controlling for marital status, the gap between female faculty members and physicians narrows, but the study finds that female faculty members are the most likely of the three job categories to be separated, divorced or widowed.

One factor that makes it easier for the male doctors to have recent offspring is that, in addition to earning more than professors, the M.D.’s are less likely to have child-care needs. That’s because male doctors are almost twice as likely to have spouses out of the labor force as are male academics (40 percent vs. 22 percent). In another sign of the impact of academic careers on parenthood, male professionals whose wives are physicians or lawyers are disproportionately likely to have had recent birth events, while male professionals whose wives are academics do not have any greater than average chance of new parenthood.

“Given the high rate at which academics marry other academics, it appears likely that the low fertility of female professors ... can account for the relative paucity of birth events among male faculty,” the report finds.

The study, “Alone in the Ivory Tower: How Birth Events Vary Among Fast-Track Professionals,” was presented at the meeting this spring of the Population Association of America. The authors are Nicholas Wolfinger, associate professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah; Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Mothers on the Fast Track; and Marc Goulden, director of data initiatives in academic affairs at Berkeley. Mason and Goulden are also members of the team that leads research work at the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, which promotes policies to help academics with family obligations.

While the population study compared academics to other professions, a committee of the American Anthropological Association has just released a report on the status of women in the field — featuring survey comparisons of male and female anthropologists. The report notes a number of differences between men and women in anthropology, and a greater satisfaction by men than women with the work environment. Men were more likely than women in a national survey of faculty members to feel that policies were supportive, while many women felt that they were burdened with a disproportionate share of administrative work in departments.

Key differences were found with regard to work/home balance: men in the field are more likely to be parents, but women are more likely to be more responsible for child care or other family obligations. For instance, of men who experienced a career interruption, 7.4 percent cited child care as the reason and 3.7 percent cited the experience of being a “trailing spouse,” one who moves when a partner is hired elsewhere. Of women who experienced career interruptions, 22.9 percent cited child care and 9.1 percent cited being a trailing spouse. And women were much more likely (52.9 percent to 5.6 percent) to anticipate a future career interruption due to child care responsibilities.

In looking at marital and parental status, men were more likely than women to be married and to have children. But given those gaps and the large gender gaps in career interruption due to childcare, one surprising figure in the survey is the percentage of men with children reporting that they are the primary caregiver — not as high a percentage as women with children, but high. (Of course, it is self-reported.)

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Britain: Disruptive pupils to be privatized

Private companies are to be given the go-ahead to take over the running of specialist units for teaching the country's most disruptive state school pupils. Ministers are considering allowing them to profit from the provision under a shake-up of the way specialist pupil referral units are run, outlined in a White Paper yesterday. The move is expected to pave the way for firms such as Group 4 Securicor and Serco, which are already highly involved in the public sector, to take over units. A spokesman for Group 4 Securicor said the firm would study the proposals and "assess whether there are opportunities to provide additional public services".

The proposal to allow the involvement of commercial companies alarmed Britain's biggest teachers' union, the National Union of Teachers, which said it was "a deeply worrying rubicon" for the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, to cross. In the past, firms running local authority services have been allowed to make profits, but not mainstream schools.

Christine Blower, the acting general secretary of the NUT, said it would lead to companies "making economies in provision for the most vulnerable people". She added: "The last thing pupil referral units need is to be outsourced to private companies. Such a move would only increase their sense of isolation from other local authority provision."

The White Paper published research that showed that 99 per cent of pupils taught in the units failed to reach the Government's benchmark of five top-grade GCSE passes. Nearly nine out of 10 of the 135,000 children taught in the units every year also fail to obtain five GCSE passes at any grade.

Under the proposals, ministers plan to invite competition for running pupil referral units, nicknamed "sin bins". They are anxious to encourage private companies and voluntary groups or charities - such as the Prince's Trust and Barnardo's to run the units. Independent schools with a record of offering boarding places for deprived children in danger of being taken into care - such as Rugby - would also be invited to apply as would sponsors of the Government's flagship academies.

Sir Alan Steer, the headteacher appointed by the Government to head an inquiry into school discipline, warned that the pupil referral units had become "the forgotten service". "Vulnerable children can be placed with others who are displaying serious criminal tendencies," he said in a letter to Mr Balls. Mr Balls said he wanted the units to offer more places to pupils at risk of expulsion - rather than those already excluded from school. "We can then help them to access the right support before the behaviour spirals out of control and reaches the point of exclusion," he said.

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States holding back schools, warns Australian Federal minister

Sounds hopeful but a bit hard to follow.

The federal Government has effectively put the states and territories on notice over the reporting of school and student performance, saying they are hampering efforts to raise standards. Education Minister Julia Gillard has also announced an overhaul of the funding model for private schools, which is understood to include the controversial guarantees that keep funding for about 60 per cent of non-government schools at inflated levels.

In a speech to the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Ms Gillard implicitly criticised states such as NSW, Queensland and South Australia, which are opposed to publicly releasing national test results. "It does not serve the interests of Australian students to have schooling policies delivered through structures and reporting systems which operate in parallel but allow no meaningful comparison or exchange between them," she said. "While different jurisdictions and authorities treat the use of data as part of a competition between themselves, they are short-changing the students and families who rely on them for a high-quality education."

Ms Gillard said she was not interested in establishing a crude form of league tables ranking schools according to raw test results. "(But) I believe there is an overwhelming public interest in developing a more comprehensive, more reliable and more open picture of school and student performance," she said.

Ms Gillard said the National Data Centre, announced last week in the budget, would act as an independent agency to validate and report on education statistics and that she expected the states and territories to contribute to its running costs. She said the centre would examine the results of national tests as well as other sources of data measuring the effect on education, such as socioeconomic status and early development. "I want to promote a more sophisticated understanding of what influences educational success," she said.

In the speech on Wednesday night, Ms Gillard said she expected a government review of the funding model for private schools to conclude in 2011 and new arrangements to start from 2013 that provide funding according to student needs as determined by socioeconomic status. The Government guaranteed existing funding levels for non-government schools until 2012 to defuse the issue during the election campaign last year. The "hit list" of private schools to lose money drawn up by previous Labor leader Mark Latham is credited with being a major factor in the ALP losing the 2004 election.

Ms Gillard described the schools funding system as "one of the most complex, most opaque and most confusing in the developed world" and she called for an end to the debate pitting public against private schools. [Stopping Leftist attacks on private school would be a good place to start]

As a first step to improving transparency, Ms Gillard will release the new socioeconomic status scores for all non-government schools, which will determine the amount of funding each school receives from next year to 2012. [Class-war Leftism again]

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