A week or so ago, some publication ran the latest in an endless string of career-advice articles about how some particular successful woman manages to balance her time between family and career. I noticed this thanks to multiple retweets of someone’s response on Twitter along the lines of “I eagerly await the article about ‘How Fathers Manage Having a Family in Academia.'”

We’re in peak kid-sports season, so believe me when I say I have Thoughts about this, and I tweeted an offer to write such a piece if someone would agree to pay me for it. Unsurprisingly, no such offer was forthcoming, because half-assed tweets are not, in fact, a way to get hired to write things.

But, you know, there’s a lot going on here that’s frustrating. On some level, “How to Manage as a Father in Academia” really is a category of article that ought to exist, if we’re ever going to move in the directly of a more equitable division of labor in academia. Better gender balance in academia (and everywhere else in the working world) will require men with families to make some of the sacrifices that are normally expected of women. One important element of getting to that point would need to be advice about how to do that and still have a successful career.

At the same time, this is a sterling example of the sort of article that’s incredibly frustrating to write, which is why I’m not doing it as a blog post for free. There are a nearly infinite number of failure modes for that kind of thing, starting with “What Do You Want, a Cookie?” and going downhill from there. And if you somehow manage to successfully thread your way between all those gaping pits, the most likely response is crickets and tumbleweed. It’s just too easily dismissed as “Well, OK, but that’s just you, and you’re atypical.” (Which is super extra frustrating, because as noted in the previous paragraph, that’s the whole point…)

So, dashing something off quickly risks widespread mockery with a small chance of social-media mobbing, and putting in enough time to navigate around those hazards most likely ends with being ignored. That’s not a good use of time, unless somebody pays for it. (There’s a productivity tip you can have for free…) Even this self-indulgent noodling on my own blog is probably a sub-optimal use of my time, but it will at least (hopefully) allow me to stop thinking about the subject for a bit.

(And, of course, there’s the usual nagging worry I have whenever writing about career matters that my personal situation really isn’t generally interesting or useful, and thus genuinely wouldn’t be worth anybody’s time but the crickets and the tumbleweed…)

Anyway, on the off chance that any editors blow through here with the tumbleweed, the offer stands: I’d be willing to take a stab at a “How to Manage as a Father in Academia,” piece, if you think it would actually be valuable to have such a thing. In the meantime, I have a bunch of work to do before it’s time for me to pick up the kids and shuttle them to their respective sports activities.