“Eight days a week”: A national snapshot of academic mothers’ realities in Canadian psychology departments.

Abstract

Researchers (e.g., Faludi, 1991; Schwartz, 1989) in the late 1980s and early 1990s explored and critiqued the phenomenon of the track (i.e., prioritising mothering) by noting that professional mothers are relegated to lower-status and lowerpaying jobs because of perceived expectations associated with their parental roles (Cummins, 2012). In academic settings, the discrimination associated with perceived mommy tracking has been put forth to explain, in part, the (van Anders, 2004) and (Mason, 2011). The leaky pipeline and pyramid problem are used to describe the tendency for university faculty who are women to occupy the lowest levels of the academic hierarchy. That is, at each successive level within academic institutions, the representation of women decreases (van Anders, 2004). Of the teaching positions at universities within Canada, 40% are occupied by women, almost half of them are mothers (CAUT, 2013), and so parental status may indeed be involved in the disproportionate representation of women at the highest academic ranks.Research has suggested that women faculty perceive the current climate in academic institutions to be less than welcoming to mothers (Castaneda & Isgro, 2013). Armenti (2004) interviewed 19 Canadian women professors who had engaged or anticipated having to engage in strategies to minimise the negative repercussions associated with their motherhood status (e.g., not being hired, negative effect on promotion and tenure reviews), and alleviate disapproval from colleagues. Results from the qualitative analysis revealed that participants with grown children reported having timed their pregnancies to coincide with the end of the academic year, and younger professors who might have started to have children opted to delay pregnancies until they had secured tenure. Overall, the perceived lack of support for academic mothers may cause some women to leave academia, delay tenure or promotions, or accept positions at teaching-focused, as opposed to research-focused, universities to prioritise their families (Damiano-Teixeira, 2006).In an effort to understand the barriers faced by academic women, Comer and Stites-Doe (2006) developed a theoretical model of three factors that complicate (or facilitate) one's ability to balance academic and parental roles. First, the phase of a woman's career (i.e., pre- or posttenure) and the stage of her family can affect a woman's role-balancing capacity. Women professors who have preschool-aged children, and women who are working toward tenure, have been theorized to experience greater difficulty. Second, the extent to which a woman's partner contributes to household and childcare tasks affects a woman's role balancing; specifically, the greater the contributions from one's partner, the better a woman's ability to balance roles. Indeed, compared with live-in support from other relatives, only spousal/partner support has been found to actually decrease the hours mothers work inside the home (Abroms & Goldscheider, 2002). Third, institutional factors (e.g., placement in a research- or teaching-focused university, work-family culture, and presence/absence of campus childcare) can affect women's role balancing.Despite the plethora of variables that could theoretically result in barriers for women, much of the empirical work examining differences between academic women and men has relied extensively on one key metric, namely, their respective publication records. Researchers consistently find that faculty men produce greater research output, and identify the ranks of assistant and full professor where this gap is most noticeable (e.g., Carleton, Parkerson, & Horswill, 2012; Nakhaie, 2002; Stack, 2004). Although number of publications is undoubtedly an important metric to consider, Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2004) caution that discrepancies in academic women's productivity (compared with academic men) may be due to breaks women take to have children. …