{"id":9577,"date":"2014-09-12T08:26:25","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T12:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9577"},"modified":"2014-09-12T08:26:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T12:26:25","slug":"fatherhood-and-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/09\/12\/fatherhood-and-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Fatherhood and Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there’s a new study of gender roles in academia<\/a>, which the Washington Post headlines “Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are”<\/a>. This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me:<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAcademic science doesn\u2019t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,\u201d said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report\u2019s authors. \u201cWe came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nThe study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in the majority of men who wanted to take on a more active role at home as fathers. But there was also resistance to change from those in power at the institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came to realize that it really benefits your career to have someone at home, making sacrifices for your career,\u201d Damaske said. \u201cThe majority of men we spoke to see that. But they\u2019re not happy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And for the men who have put family first, they talked of feeling isolated from their colleagues and that they\u2019d made career concessions others hadn\u2019t. \u201cI am not nearly as productive as I used to be,\u201d one associate biology professor said. \u201cNo academic institution is particularly \u2013 that I know of \u2013 is particularly great for family \u2026 the people that do best in academica, sadly, often are those who don\u2019t\u2019 have [the responsibility] of child care.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sort of thing is something I have written<\/a> about<\/a> many<\/a> times<\/a>. I don’t have the time right now to spend crafting detailed responses to this particular study that wouldn’t be potentially problematic. But two quick other notes:<\/p>\n

— This is nothing new<\/a>— scientists with families have been dealing with inconvenient arrangements for roughly as long as there have been scientists with families. And they’ve been getting through mostly through the active support of family. The current study is mostly just a redistribution of the problem due to changing norms and expectations.<\/p>\n

— This is not unique to academic science. SteelyKid has started playing outdoor soccer through the community recreation program. Their first practice was last night, at 5:30, and I took her (thus the photo at the top of this post). I was the only father there who wasn’t coaching a team. A couple of other dads showed up by the time things wrapped up, but it was almost entirely moms, who either stay home, or arrange their work schedules so they’re free in time to do early-evening kid soccer. I suspect a few of those late-arriving fathers would’ve been happy to be there earlier, but didn’t feel free to leave work early to do that. And as I always point out when I write about this, we live in a very affluent suburb full of people with good white-collar jobs– these problems are immeasurably worse for people who have to punch a clock. Who mostly aren’t at these kinds of kid-oriented events for just that reason.<\/p>\n

Anyway, while I can’t comment in much detail, I didn’t want to let this study pass without any comment. It’s mostly just nailing down stuff anybody who’s close to the situation already knew, but it’s a slightly different angle on the problem than has been seen before, and valuable for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there’s a new study of gender roles in academia, which the Washington Post headlines “Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are”. This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me: \u201cAcademic science doesn\u2019t just have a gender problem, but a… Continue reading Fatherhood and Academia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,139,2,82,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-culture","category-personal","category-socialscience","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}