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Tomorrow's Professor: Women Professors with Children
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Work and Family Life
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By chawne
Posted Tue Jan 11, 2005 at 08:23:52 PM PDT
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TP Message #613:
"The details of the stories varied widely, but common themes included the necessity for choices and giving up on some things, the benefits of shared responsibilities, the importance of private time for self and spouse, and for developing strategies that work. Specific strategies included setting priorities consistent with family, limiting travel, delegating responsibility, and advance planning and anticipating."
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In June 2004 a workshop on Mentoring in Engineering was held at Stanford with the joint support of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM, administered by the NSF and funded by the White House) and the Stanford School of
Engineering. The two day workshop brought together graduate students and all levels of faculty for presentations and discussions on the needs, goals, methods, and best practices for mentoring students, junior faculty, and mid level faculty for academic careers. The emphasis was on mentoring members of underrepresented groups in academic engineering, especially women, but most of the topics are common to all interested in academic engineering careers. An excerpt on Women Professors With Children appears below followed by a copy of the table of contents of the proceedings. The full Workshop Proceedings are available at the workshop website in both pdf format for printing and html
format for Web viewing.
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
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WOMEN PROFESSORS WITH CHILDREN
This session was intended to provide some advice, anecdotes, perspectives, and information about combining children with an academic engineering career. The session resulted in two chapters in this book. The first talk of the session concerned the timing of children- should one have babies during one's graduate student years, during a postdoc, as a faculty member pre-tenure, or should one wait until after tenure? A wealth of data relevant to these questions is presented in chapter *. The remainder of the session concerned strategies for balancing work and family once a baby has arrived, issues treated in chapter *. The presentation, discussions, and the chapter collect anecdotes regarding successful balancing of children and career from four women engineering professors.
Obviously children are of concern to both parents and not just women faculty, but equally obviously the workload is different with childbirth and women historically have borne the brunt of childcare. All but one of the panelists in this session were women, but men participated actively in the discussions.
The details of the stories varied widely, but common themes included the necessity for choices and giving up on some things, the benefits of shared responsibilities, the importance of private time for self and spouse, and for developing strategies that work. Specific strategies included setting priorities consistent with family, limiting travel, delegating responsibility, and advance planning and anticipating.
The rewards of an academic life are many: the job is intellectually stimulating, and you work on a problem you love. It's flexible and customizable, and you have the self-determination that comes from having no boss, and from choosing what you work on. You have the satisfaction of knowing that you are contributing to the knowledge of the human race, and you are training the next generation of scientists and inventors.
From the point of view of having children, the rewards of being a professor and parent are also numerous. The work week and work day are flexible, so you can go to school performances and sports events and parent-teacher conferences, without having to punch a time clock, and in fact without having to notify anyone that you are leaving, and without having to account for your time to anyone. The children are exposed to all sorts of fascinating intellectual topics from an early age; they learn to appreciate the questions and the approach to answers that a mind devoted to the pursuit of new knowledge produces. Also the children of women who are engineering faculty do not grow up with some of the stereotypical notions of women that other segments of the population may have, e.g., that girls can't do math, and that a woman's place is in the home.
Proceedings Table of Contents
* Contents
* Preface
* Acknowledgements
* Overview
* Mentoring
* Best Practices
* Early and mid career mentoring
* How to be as bright and capable as everyone seems to think you are
* Mentoring support: National and local resources for mentoring
* Mentoring for academic leadership
* Women professors with children
* Epilog
* Mentoring
* References
* Best practices
* General observations
* Stages of mentoring
* Issues in mentoring of women
* Early and mid career mentoring
* Introduction
* Graduate students
* Junior faculty
* Maintaining momentum after tenure
* How to feel as bright and capable
* What is the Imposter Syndrome?
* Who's Most at Risk for the Imposter Syndrome?
* If They Only Knew ...How Imposters Explain Away Success
* The Phew Factor: Fooled Them Again
* Refining Competence
* About the Author
* Mentoring support
* Web resources
* Case Studies
* MentorNet
* Mentoring: A Berkeley Perspective
* Mentoring at the Center for Workforce Development
* The Caltech Women's Center
* The NSF ADVANCE Program
* Advancing women at Virginia Tech through institutional transformation
* Mentoring for academic leadership
* Academic Leadership
* Choosing Leadership
* Mentoring for academic leadership
* Women professors with children
* Introduction
* Timing of Children
* Strategies
* Conclusions
* Do babies mattter?
* Survey of Doctorate Recipients
* Leaks in the Pipeline to Tenure
* Leaks in the Pipeline: Tenure Track to Tenure
* Family Status
* Family Status 12 Years out from PhD
* UC work and family survey
* Everyone is very busy
* The baby lag for UC women in pursuit of tenure
* Biological baby births by age of UC faculty
* Having fewer children than they wanted
* Sloan Grant
* Epilog
* Appendix: Participants
* Footnotes
* * * * * * * *
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