Notes on "Mothers on the Fast Track"
This book takes a look at the state of women, particularly women with children, in "fast track" careers: academics, medicine, journalism, law, corporate management, and politics. Mary Ann Mason has been studying these issues for many years, and has helped make the UC system much more family-friendly. She gave a talk during a "women's breakfast" at the last conference I went to, and I was interested to know more, so I picked up her most recent book.
"Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Career" (which Ms Mason co-wrote with her daughter, Eve Mason Ekman) is a quick read: 124 pages, plus 12 of references. The title makes it sound like a self-help book, but it's not. The focus is more institutional than personal. I highly recommend it for men and women.
Basically, the thesis of the book is that highly-trained women in these "fast-track" professions who have children tend to end up in "second-tier" positions (for instance, in academics, the non-tenure-track instructor). While these can be satisfying and a good way to achieve balance, the argument is that people in these positions need better job security and benefits, plus ways to get back on the fast track if they choose. It's not that tenure-track women aren't getting tenured; it's that they aren't taking tenure-track jobs to begin with.
Ms Mason also talks a lot (in this work and elsewhere) about the "make or break" years, between the ages of 30 and 40, where the age where you want to start a family collides with getting your career off the ground. She's working to make them less "make or break" career-wise. Encouragingly, she says that women who manage to get through these years tend to succeed and be satisfied with their lives.
She worries that if women don't start making it to the top tiers of their professions, we'll suffer a backlash for women in graduate education: It will again be seen to be wasted on women. She talks about why institutions should want to keep women on the fast track. I also found this discussion to be encouraging. Lots of people and institutions have put time and money into my training (thanks, US taxpayers!), and I have something real to contribute. Institutions shouldn't be flexible to my needs out of the goodness of their institutional hearts; they should do it because I'm a valuable human resource.
I said this wasn't a self-help book, but it does contain a bit of discussion on personal reasons why some women succeed on the fast track. A supportive partner seems to be key (and, boy, do I have one!), as is finding good mentors (ditto!) and perseverance/willingness to fight your way back onto the on-ramp. (Senator Dianne Feinstein is quoted in the book: "You have to be like a phoenix.")
One of the two big reasons I left research after undergraduate was that I falsely believed that having a family and a research career wasn't possible. (I also falsely believed that I couldn't contribute to society through doing physics.) In the end, my detour into teaching was valuable in many, many ways, not least of which being that it showed me that there are on-ramps. I'm still glad I didn't go straight to graduate school, but I do wish I had understood better what my options were.
"Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Career" (which Ms Mason co-wrote with her daughter, Eve Mason Ekman) is a quick read: 124 pages, plus 12 of references. The title makes it sound like a self-help book, but it's not. The focus is more institutional than personal. I highly recommend it for men and women.
Basically, the thesis of the book is that highly-trained women in these "fast-track" professions who have children tend to end up in "second-tier" positions (for instance, in academics, the non-tenure-track instructor). While these can be satisfying and a good way to achieve balance, the argument is that people in these positions need better job security and benefits, plus ways to get back on the fast track if they choose. It's not that tenure-track women aren't getting tenured; it's that they aren't taking tenure-track jobs to begin with.
Ms Mason also talks a lot (in this work and elsewhere) about the "make or break" years, between the ages of 30 and 40, where the age where you want to start a family collides with getting your career off the ground. She's working to make them less "make or break" career-wise. Encouragingly, she says that women who manage to get through these years tend to succeed and be satisfied with their lives.
She worries that if women don't start making it to the top tiers of their professions, we'll suffer a backlash for women in graduate education: It will again be seen to be wasted on women. She talks about why institutions should want to keep women on the fast track. I also found this discussion to be encouraging. Lots of people and institutions have put time and money into my training (thanks, US taxpayers!), and I have something real to contribute. Institutions shouldn't be flexible to my needs out of the goodness of their institutional hearts; they should do it because I'm a valuable human resource.
I said this wasn't a self-help book, but it does contain a bit of discussion on personal reasons why some women succeed on the fast track. A supportive partner seems to be key (and, boy, do I have one!), as is finding good mentors (ditto!) and perseverance/willingness to fight your way back onto the on-ramp. (Senator Dianne Feinstein is quoted in the book: "You have to be like a phoenix.")
One of the two big reasons I left research after undergraduate was that I falsely believed that having a family and a research career wasn't possible. (I also falsely believed that I couldn't contribute to society through doing physics.) In the end, my detour into teaching was valuable in many, many ways, not least of which being that it showed me that there are on-ramps. I'm still glad I didn't go straight to graduate school, but I do wish I had understood better what my options were.