Last Friday ODB had his first sick day from daycare. These days generally make me nervous. Ol' Dirty is sick which sends my mommy nerves into overdrive and then I worry about struggling to work from home for the day. It is usually a losing battle and my productivity tanks. I worry more about when the semester starts and I have classes that are less flexible to work around. An academic job offers a lot of flexibility with the running joke 'you can work any 100 hours a week that you want'. However, it also offers little redundancy. There are not many, and sometimes any people, to cover my responsibilities in the event that I am out. During my maternity leave, my teaching responsibilities were covered but my research responsibilities were not. I submitted grant proposals, recruited new graduate students, wrote recommendation letters, interviewed faculty candidates, organized a meeting for a program officer visiting campus, advised graduate students, reviewed journal articles, presented to prospective donors, and fielded my undergraduates course registration questions. On the day I returned to work, my first graduate student defended his master's thesis.
I really do enjoy my job and I love being a mom. However, I am generally nervous about my prospective for a long term career. There are countless articles, books, conferences and discussions regarding women's advancement in professional settings and a notable lack of women in leadership roles. In most professional fields, women will plateau professionally. In academia, if you don't get promoted with tenure, you get the boot. Of the approximately one hundred tenure-track faculty in my engineering college, only 13 are women. In my department, I am now the only female tenure-track faculty who is also a mom.
Contrary to public perception, my job as a professor is not solely about teaching. Though teaching is an important part of my job, most of the metrics that will be considered in my case for tenure are research based: how much grant money was I able to secure, how many papers did I publish, how many Ph.D. students did I graduate. Also important is my reputation within my research community, gauged by letters sought from other top researchers and academics in my field. Having a baby pre-tenure can make this more difficult. For example while pregnant with ODB, I had to turn down two invitations to travel to international conferences because my OBGYN advised against it. Both conferences would have been great networking opportunities.
There are certainly measures within many universities to help accommodate women who have a baby (or babies) while on the tenure track. At my university, after the arrival of the first baby you get a one year extension to your tenure clock. Though this is a standard extension, internally these measures can be met with trepidation. In my conversations regarding maternity leave and tenure with my department head, he expressed concern about me taking a full maternity leave and adding a year to my tenure clock. He asked me rather insensitively if I would take the full leave or if I would be like a Native American who has a baby on the side of the field and then gets right back to work (yes, that actually happened). He also cautioned me that tenure cases that do not proceed in the standard amount of years (the review begins at the beginning of your 6th year), can be met with scrutiny. Some believe that committees who review tenure cases with the maternity leave extension expect additional productivity because they had additional time. I wonder if members of these committees have ever had stitches in their most sensitive area, had to submit a doctor's note with their due date to ask for a extension from a funding agency or pumped breast milk in a public toilet at a conference.
The only thing that I can do is give it my best effort and hope that it works out. I know that I my tenure case will be reviewed along side single faculty and faculty with stay-at-home spouses and that I will never be able to put in the same amount of hours with a baby at home and KH 90-miles away four days a week. But I wouldn't change welcoming a ODB into our family!
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