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Professor (Mrs.) Dasgupta (*) (prasad)

The Daily Princetonian has a story about percentages of female faculty, which are neither particularly high nor rising rapidly. The article doesn’t do either sexism or the Larry Summers stuff, and instead focuses on the lifestyle difficulties inherent in obtaining tenure, at least as currently structured:

Director of the Women’s Center Amada Sandoval said she was “surprised that we are not on par with our peers,” adding that she thinks the gender gap is a significant problem at the University. One of the biggest obstacles for women is the way the timeline for the tenure system is structured, she explained.

“The way the tenure system works, if you were hired in the tenure track, you would first be an assistant professor,” she said. “After six years, your position would be associate professor if you received tenure, and after a certain amount of time after that, you might be promoted to a full professor. This tenure structure is really hostile to people who anticipate having a family or people who are trying to have a family.”

The tenure system is not keeping up with social changes that have occurred in the past several years, Sandoval noted.

“I think the tenure system really hasn’t changed since most of the tenured faculty were men and most of the women stayed at home with the children,” she said. “That’s not the kind of world that we live in any more … I would say the system needs to get more flexible. It’s not just women that want to spend time with their children. It’s men, too, and they’re getting more and more able to admit that as our gender norms are softening up a bit.” (emphases added)

To zeroth order, one wins tenure at a top university (in addition to being smart and working on the right topics and making the right networking moves and all that jazz) by working all the time and not having a life. This isn’t too conducive to success in family related pursuits, especially if the pursuits in question involve babies.

To the extent that, as Ms. Sandoval seems to think, female Assistant Professors are less willing to forego rich family lives, it’s not clear to me that this is a problem a university either could or should fix, at least if the commodity it is most interested in maximizing is research output. A six-month or year long stop in the tenure clock for infant-tending seems decent, but it’s not my understanding that baby-work falls off rapidly after the first year. Delayed / flexible tenure tracks are especially problematic in the sciences or in engineering, where the expectation is that a researcher’s best work will have been done by age 45.

If the problem instead is that male junior faculty find it rather easier to find stay-at-home wives, no university has the ability to provide ambitious female professors desirous of home comforts with men who enjoy pushing baby-strollers and are willing to maintain the household. That change presumably comes about via societal changes in mores about about work in and out of home, supported by Scandinavian-style governmental legislation about paternity leave etc. I’m not claiming a university do nothing – CERN has a nice daycare center, for example; but to the extent that parity is the goal and the problem isn’t of the sexist-hiring-committee variety, I doubt an individual university can make dramatic improvements or even lead industry.

(*) A form of address I came across once

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4 responses to “Professor (Mrs.) Dasgupta (*) (prasad)”

  1. Dean C. Rowan

    I can’t tell whether prasad (What happened, by the way, to prasaD?) is being serious, provocative, or playful, but I’ll bite. Most of the arguments here for status quo, give or take, do little more than beg the question: tenure track isn’t conducive to leading a healthy family life; universities are interested in maximizing research output; researchers in the sciences are expected to devote themselves to the academy until they approach middle age; professional success is the reciprocal of personal flourishing. But then there are the comments about the capacity of a university to be of much help, really. Last I checked, universities are equipped with cadres of smart people focused on solving all manner of problems. This is one of the kinds of problems a university could solve if it chose to, even a lone outlier university, a Princeton, for instance. Universities like to distinguish themselves, don’t they? When I attended a large research university as a graduate student decades ago–a university with business, architecture, and urban planning schools–I was constantly irritated by the abysmal parking situation. Why can’t these guys [sic] fix this? They can build one medical center on top of another, but they can’t optimize the parking situation for everybody. Of course, it was a naive query. They can fix it. They simply choose not to. It’s a matter of priority, and that has nothing to do with a university’s ability to effect dramatic improvement.

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  2. prasad

    I was being serious!
    Wasn’t rejoicing in the status quo; was predicting it won’t change through tinkering at the university administration level. If anything university is going to be harder to reform than say Coca Cola company – if (lack of) male homemakers is an issue it seems plausible that a woman earning 250k will find/afford one of those easier than some assistant professor/adjunct type barely scratching 80k.
    As for the fact that universities suck all the mind-juice out of people in their prime by offering one in a hundred a shiny bauble at the end, it’s a pretty nifty device for extracting extreme amounts of quality work from many people for very little, plays precisely to the psychology of those hundred, who know exactly what they’re in for, and has a demonstrated track-record. No part of the game, perfectly in general, is designed for the ease and comfort of the people playing for the prize.
    If that system gender discriminates then yep, it needs reform. And no, differing levels of motivation in the Princetonian spirit don’t cut it…we’re meant to be monks and bookish scholar types, midnight oil and all, studying under the masters to replace them if we get lucky.
    “Of course, it was a naive query. They can fix it. They simply choose not to. It’s a matter of priority, and that has nothing to do with a university’s ability to effect dramatic improvement.”: this strikes me as both mistaken and bizarre. From ‘X hasn’t been fixed’ to ‘no-one cares to fix it’ is a pretty big leap, especially when you leap right over ‘X is a hard problem’

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  3. Ruchira

    An old joke:

    A student to a woman professor: Do I call you Professor X or Mrs. X?
    Professor: Mrs. X, please. I worked harder for that title.

    How many men in academia would sympathize with that?

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  4. Dean C. Rowan

    I recognize that X (say, parking) can be a hard problem to solve. In fact, I figured that goes without saying, so I didn’t say it. But my logic isn’t bizarre. My logic begins with the assumption that universities exist to solve all manner of hard problems. The naivety of the query stems from the expectation that a university administration might lose a moment’s sleep worrying about how students will fare getting to and from campus. So, again, I trust they are capable of solving the problem, albeit not without incurring political costs, and that they choose not to do so, clearly, because of those costs.
    Not a joke, but a real-life anecdote. After college, I worked for part of a year at a daycare center as a teacher’s aid. All of the former teachers and aids had been female. The kids, 2 to 4 years old, were accustomed to addressing their teachers as Miss Smith, Miss Marlene, Miss Somebody. When the teachers introduced the new teacher’s aid, I was immediately dubbed by the kids Miss Dean, and not without a knowing smirk. I didn’t work hard–or at all–for the title, but I’m proud of it to this day.

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