About time.

Thank God. Everywhere needs to do this. In the humanities, doctorates often take ten years, by which time women (who, I think, make up the majority of humanities grad students) are hovering on the edge of infertility. Their dissertation directors, who are usually male, rarely think about it.

S, Lecturer at Texas, at 1:36 pm EST on January 30, 2006

Oh, please! I’m all for parity but it is a basic biological fact that women do indeed have a “clock” they must beat when it comes to years of fertility. Men do not have the same biological pressures. I had to choose between a career in academia and childbirth. It was clear that I could not do both as a woman and a scholar. Men I studied alongside had children because their wives’ pregnancies did not impact whether or not a professor thought they could continue as a TA. They didn’t lose funding because they had to miss classes. Because of the pressures to produce research, rather than babies, I chose academia in a male-dominated field. Now, I struggle with fertility treatments in an effort to have a family. Kudos to Stanford for making family a priority!

EH, Ph.D., at 4:30 am EST on January 31, 2006

Indeed, this policy seems to really hurt men or others that want to adopt. Women, by virtue of the fact that they have working wombs are now given a chance to NOT work, whereas people who would adopt (or men that would take care of kids) must continue to work.

But, it seems that adopt is considered a luxury that the people with good jobs in the middle class undertake, whereas giving birth is considered a fundamental right that all women (regardless of their wealth or obligations) can and mus do.

Larry, at 1:25 pm EST on February 1, 2006

It’s the labor, ***!

Catching up on my IHE reading...

Larry, I would propose that the HUGELY PHYSICALLY TAXING and sometimes dangeours nature of pregnancy and childbirth may have something to do with a genuine need of recovery time. You can’t possibly be discounting the physical toll this takes on a person?

That said, I think paternal and adoptive-parent leaves should be enacted as soon as possible, and moreover be equal in duration to maternal leaves. But that’s dictated by my desire to see our quality of life increase, not by a belief that the physical demands are distributed equally. So please spare me the “by virtue of having working wombs” bit. It’s not only irrelevant but offensive.

Vika Zafrin, Brown University, at 5:15 pm EST on February 16, 2006

Kudos, and let’s see more

Thanks for covering this, it’s really important. Academe is really behind the corporate world in terms of making room for family life, both for graduate students and for professors.

Let’s see more universities adopt family policies that extend this one. Currently FMLA is twelve weeks, let’s see Stanford extend it’s covered leave period to match this. Let’s see them make it gender neutral and extend it to fathers too, if they haven’t already, so that female students as a category won’t be informally discriminated against, or accused of having “privileges” not available to men.

And if they don’t already have it, let’s see Stanford offer heavily subsidized, high quality childcare to all students and faculty who need it. Only then will students be covered during their children’s infancy, and afterward too.

I offer this in the spirit of congratulations, and of visions for an even better future.

Miriam Peskowitz, Author, The Truth behind the Mommy Wars, at 8:30 pm EST on March 1, 2006