Rachel Hile Bassett has been balancing academic work and family responsibilities while serving as editor of a new book on the topic. Parenting and Professing: Balancing Family Work With an Academic Career, was published this month by Vanderbilt University Press. (more)
This is from another extremely helpful site, Inside Higher Ed, that I've recently blogrolled. The best part of this interview? The author aknowledges the following:
It’s important to keep in mind the overwhelming class privilege of the professoriate as a group, as well as the fact that discussions of family friendly policies in academia generally focus on the working conditions of faculty, not, for example, support staff.
Well, add another book to the old "To Get" list...
We talk about the disparity between executives and their support staff all the time, I don't think there is an easy answer. While I can do my work from home when I am on maternity leave, a baby is sick, or I am on my third vacation of the year, assistant work is assistant work and SOMEONE needs to be in the office to answer the phones, patch calls through, send out scripts, etc...While a great assistant can be invaluable, they are more easily replaced than the executive or the professor, which is why so many accommodations are made towards their retention rather than the support staff. An argument can be made for giving a valuable employee a five month paid maternity leave which is harder to make for the assistant, who will also have to be replaced during that leave, doubling the expense. Right? I know it is inherently unfair; as a former assistant it used to drive me nuts, but in my industry (entertainment) it's also part of paying dues, an no one stays an assistant forever - we all move up, or out.
Posted by: Mieke at June 30, 2005 01:17 PMToo true...although I think fathers often struggle with whether they can actually take time off for paternity leave or whether they can even approach their employer for such a request. Academia lends itself to more policy friendly requests for leave but again tend to be more geared towards faculty and not staff.
The professoriate group as a whole IS privileged but I would add that the nature of the work faculty do, especially tenure track faculty, does not limit itself to 40 hours a week which is very different from staff in most cases.
Posted by: Kevin at June 30, 2005 03:40 PMToo tired to scour your site for your email address, I wanted to let you know about Jennifer and her work http://www.mommytoo.com/. She is a frequent contributor to www.halfchangedworld.com (http://elb.typepad.com/halfchangedworld/2005/07/cafta.html#comments)- a really interesting site run by Elizabeth in DC.
Posted by: Mieke at July 8, 2005 09:38 AM