Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger & Marc Goulden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013; 188 pp; ISBN: 978-0-81356-081-6, cloth $72 USD; ISBN: 978-0-81356-080-9, paper $25.95 USD; ISBN: 978-0-81356-715-0, e-book $25.95 USD.

Review by Di Brandt

Do Babies Matter is a riveting read, from its startling title to its formidable array of statistical, anecdotal and interpretive evidence of serious gender and family trouble in the contemporary academy, to its visionary policy advice on how to improve things in this important area of cultural life.

Anyone who has experienced unreasonable stress in juggling the dual demands of an academic career and family (defined here primarily as marriage and/or children), or in sacrificing family opportunities for the sake of an academic career — and this includes pretty well all women and also many men currently employed in the profession — will find this book calls up a wide range of intense feelings, culminating in gratitude for the kinds of changes that have been made in the direction of gender inclusiveness and family friendliness in the academy in recent decades. Simultaneously, many readers will experience a sense of outrage at how much more needs to be done to level the playing field for women, particularly, but also to enable a more manageable rapprochement between career and personal life for everyone.

The authors, Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Marc Goulden, based in Berkeley, deserve a huge thank you for this landmark study, which draws on more than a decade of intensive original baseline research, focussed primarily on the nine (now 10) campuses of the University of California system, with additional reliance on the nationally representative Survey of Doctorate Recipients. The results are compelling and engagingly presented, and offer “the first broad examination of the effects of family formation on the academic careers of men and women across their professional lives” — and also, insightfully, the effects of professional academic life on the personal and family lives of men and women.

In a previous study using the 2000 US Census, the authors came to the conclusion that the academy was considerably less family friendly to both women and men than in the equally prestigious, competitive and challenging professions of medicine and law. They saw a political opportunity to argue that the academy was losing its best and brightest to more family-friendly professions, and managed to obtain support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge project, which enacted reform throughout the University of California system (profiled at http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/).

This successful moment of activism on the part of the authors gives them a unique edge in presenting the current survey, able to measure the often dismaying results of their questionnaires and statistical analyses of ongoing discrimination against female faculty, and fraught relations between its hard-working faculty and their personal and family lives, against the lofty principles and successful practices of its reform project, which is gradually influencing changes in the direction of more family-friendly policies across California.

There are similar changes happening in university communities across the nation and internationally, including in Canada. It is hard to say how many of them are being directly influenced by the Berkeley project and how many are happening in tandem with it. What is clear is that most of the data and insights in this well-documented study will resonate widely in the Canadian university context, and in modern universities worldwide. It should be required reading for everyone involved in university education at the graduate, faculty and administrative levels, everywhere.

Slightly more than half of the doctoral degrees granted in American universities today are being earned by women. This is itself a remarkable accomplishment of gender parity, achieved not without considerable struggle and policy changes, as the authors observe, over the past 40 years. But the career opportunities awaiting women at the end of this already remarkable achievement are not remotely equal to those available to men. Women are far less likely to land tenure-track academic appointments than men, or to achieve tenure and promotion, or to rise to administrative ranks, for a range of reasons, extensively documented in the book. First and foremost among these reasons is women’s typically higher investment in family responsibilities, including parenting and deference to their partner’s position and location.

But this study is not only, or centrally, about the inequities facing female academics. It is about the difficulty of balancing career and family obligations with professional life in the academy. Men, too, wish to participate in family life as well as their careers. Now that women are no longer typically staying home to raise the children and support their husbands’ careers in a full-time capacity, the possibility of spending quality time with spouses and children, and supporting a meaningful family life is becoming more challenging — and more creatively valued — for male academics as well.

How can universities more actively support family-friendly work environments for their faculty, without compromising the push for professional excellence or regressing to discriminatory (and illegal) employment practices? Here is where the book, already dazzling in the adeptness and intelligence of its surveys and their insightful interpretations, shines most brightly.

According to the authors, family-friendly policies that honour professional excellence and opportunity for both men and women, and at the same time actively encourage both women and men to cultivate and enjoy satisfying family lives, is overwhelmingly the key to wide improvement in the lives of professional academics, and therefore, by implication and direct influence, in the life of the culture as a whole.

Family-friendly policies for faculty members successfully promoted in the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge project and developed further for consideration in this study include: tenure-clock stoppage for family responsibilities, paid parental leave at the birth of children (available to both mothers and fathers), subsidized and emergency child care, adequate campus parking facilities to accommodate the vagaries of parenting schedules (!), part-time tenure-track appointments, reentry training fellowships for parents who dropped out of their careers for a few years to raise children or look after aging parents, dual hiring policies for married faculty, college tuition remission for dependents, adoption expenses, and maternal and dependent health insurance.

In order for these policies to work effectively, the authors insist, they must be made available as opt-out entitlements, not special requests, and must be widely known. They must be posted clearly on university websites, personnel offices and other key sites. Administrators, including (and especially) department heads, must be trained in the benefits and specifics of family-friendly policies, and required to promote them to faculty members in a pro­active way.

“A holistic view of university life,” the authors eloquently conclude, “requires workplace flexibility throughout an academic career.” The future of universities depends on a “serious rethinking” of the whole system. The lock-step, ironclad “pipeline” model of productivity and success, with no possibility of modification or digression for family responsibilities, puts an inhumane burden on the system and the productive, talented people who make up its ranks.

This inflexible approach, fashioned in another era when people’s lives were organized very differently than they are now, drives away a significant percentage of the best and brightest young minds immediately after graduation, when the huge investment in their education should be creatively mobilized into professional opportunities. For those who do find full-time employment in their fields of expertise, the system exacts an unreasonable toll on their personal and family lives, which often directly or indirectly affects the quality of their work and productivity as well.

The authors stop short of implying that the nature and worth of scholarship as such might benefit from a more balanced view and experience of professional work and family life, but it is not hard to imagine it might be so. After all, what is all that brilliant, energetic, hard work for if not to enhance the quality of our lives, both individually and collectively? In this way, correcting the gender and family troubles in the academy becomes a utopian act, an investment in a better future where indeed, babies, and their mothers, and their fathers, and the lives they forge together in creative dialogue with the profession we devote so much of our lives to as academics, matter.

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Di Brandt teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at Brandon University.