Childcare as a Leaky Pipeline Issue

[astra_nomer]

The "leaky pipeline" metaphor is explained in this article as:

In corporations, women tend to talk about a "glass ceiling." In academia, the more commonly used metaphor is the "leaky pipeline." The flood of women in graduate and professional schools gives way to a trickle at the highest levels in many fields.

And as with many articles on the subject, it cites having children and trying to balance career and family as one of the biggest obstacles to keeping women in science. And look, a way to tackle the problem!

Grant won a Claflin Award. It was only a modest prize -- $60,000 over two years, offered since 1997 to select Massachusetts General Hospital women trying to balance their medical research with young children. But, she says, it made an enormous difference: It not only paid for staff to help on her research, it gave her "the positive feedback you need when you're overworked and exhausted to kind of keep in the game."

I'm a huge fan of grants programs like this that give women scientists a hand up when they have children.

On the other hand, this item bring up an important point. Why is childcare always considered almost exclusively a woman's issue?

Most men in corporate, political, judicial and non-profit positions of power -- Democrats, Republicans, independents, apoliticals -- don't have childcare as a national problem anywhere on their radar screens. It's a "woman's issue." A special interest group concern. Their wives' problem. Despite the fact that, obviously, men have something to do with creating children.

And I totally agree. Which is why DH and I do our best to share childcare duties.

This begs the question, why not make the grants programs cited above open to both new mothers and new fathers? To which I say, fine, if the father is actually doing the bulk of the work tending to the children -- which is just not the case in most families. But that involves a huge cultural shift, as evidenced by the second article. And maybe if men in positions of power did pay attention, then special help for young mothers in academia would not be necessary. So until that happens, I'm fine with giving women an extra hand up.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Gosh, $60K is modest. Makes me wonder how the cost of that grant would compare with the cost of finding and training a similarly qualified replacement had they lost her -- I bet it's on the same order.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

$60K was over two years - only $30K/yr. And don't forget all the time lost by having to search and train a replacement. A real bargain, I'd say.

[deadpuppy5.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of awards like this being a little more plentiful, and then using the gender neuter 'primary parent', or some such, to do filtering on applicants. It does seem to me like a chunk of the problem is the expectation that the woman will be doing the primary parenting in addition to whatever she decides to do. It seems like breaking this expectation in addition to funding/recognition is needed.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

The trouble with making it gender neutral is how do you assure that the person applying for the award is actually the primary parent, and not someone who plans to have a kid, let his spouse do all the childcare and household chores, and then use the extra money to get an extra jump ahead? And this isn't entirely hypothetical - I've heard about men using paternity leave as a chance to get some extra research done while off the tenure clock.

Tricky, isn't it?

[ayekamn.livejournal.com]

This is such a difficult subject. Until the average woman can negotiate child-care duties with her husband, I don't think this will ever get taken seriously in politics, and awards like this will be necessary to augment the childcare issue.

I've seen some scarily unequal relationship among my female friends, and I'm not exactly sure why they put up with it. There's some personal responsibility issues here as well.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. There's a lot of social conditioning and guilt involved, so it can be really hard to fight stereotypical gender roles. Sometimes I feel like I'm falling down on the job as a wife and mother because my husband does so much around the house. But then I have to remind myself that I don't have to feel guilty about bucking patriarchical norms.

[imli5533.livejournal.com]

i thought this chronicle article Are Your Parental-Leave Policies Legal? was interesting. it talks about how not giving paternity leave is illegal. their ideal policy is the new harvard law school policy "which grants a paid leave to any faculty member who is 'the sole caretaker of his or her newborn or newly adopted child at least 20 hours per week, from Monday through Friday, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.'"

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting article! Thanks for pointing it out. I like this:

What constitutes "co-equal"? The Harvard policy does not leave that to the imagination. That's important because studies show that men tend to assess their contribution as "equal" even when objective measures show that they are doing nowhere near half the household work.

In other words, having a quantifiable measure of time spent with child-rearing is really important for determining parental leave benefits.