We need to find ways to make academic work more family friendly.

That's the message I take from new data CAUT has collected showing a significant "baby gap" among female faculty members. Nearly one half of the female academics in Canada between the ages of 35 and 39 have no children under the age of 12 living at home. For female physicians of the same age, by contrast, less than a third have no young children. What is it about academic work that has created this baby gap?

Many women will tell you that trying to combine an academic career with raising children creates a number of problems. Time taken off for maternity leave can delay the tenure process and disrupt research commitments. In fact, the not-so-subtle message in the academy, and something I heard many times while in graduate school, is: "Don't even think about having babies until you have your tenure. If you get pregnant, it will mean the end of your career." Unfortunately even some women who obtained tenure and then had babies have been disadvantaged.

Mary Ann Mason, the first woman dean of graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, has surveyed women in the American academy on this issue. Her results show that not only do babies make a difference to women's academic careers, but also the timing of when they have babies is significant. Overall, men with "early babies" - those born within five years from when a parent has completed a PhD - are 38 per cent more likely than women with early babies to become tenured. Women with early babies are 71 per cent more likely to take a few years off before pursuing the goal of tenure and of those, very few return to a tenure-stream position.

The result is that most men who obtain tenure are married with children while most tenured women are not married and more than twice as many delay having children for as long as 12 years after completing doctoral studies (more than twice as many as men). Of the women with PhDs who do have children, many wind up on the contract academic staff treadmill

The problem facing women is that the critical childbearing years are also the same years in which they must establish their academic careers. In Mason's words, these are the years when the "fast track and the reproductive track are on a collision course."

Some might argue female academics who don't have children have simply chosen to put their careers before family. However, the evidence shows this is less a choice than a requirement. In her survey, Mason asked women and men if they wanted to have more children. She found that more than a third of the female faculty wanted more children, in comparison to just 18 per cent of their male colleagues.

Clearly, the nature of academic work means women have to make tremendous sacrifices. Changes need to be made that ensure women are not penalized for having families. The University of California has developed some policies that are worth considering around "tenure clock stoppage" for new mothers, part-time work arrangements and guaranteed childcare places.

CAUT is actively encouraging and supporting more family-friendly policies at our universities and colleges. In addition to ongoing collective bargaining support for locals on this issue, CAUT is conducting a survey on campus-based day care facilities and looking into the impact of women's different career tracks on their pension benefits.

We cannot rely on the whims of administrators to take the initiative. CAUT and its member faculty associations need to develop policies and language that can be enshrined in our collective agreements. It's time our campuses become more family friendly.