The Realization

All my life, I was told that I could do “anything I wanted,” and while I pushed myself to do just that (and received plenty of support and encouragement along the way), nobody ever qualified such statements with an “oh, by the way – you may be able to do anything you want, but there’s no WAY you’ll be able to do everything you want.”

Of course, if someone had said that, I wouldn’t have listened anyway. I went to a small liberal arts institution as an undergraduate, where I was able to pursue my dream of studying cognition in nonhuman primates. I had a fantastic female role model for a mentor: she was in a stable long-term relationship and had one daughter, and taught and did research as well. There was no doubt in my mind that I could pursue an academic career, get married at some point, and have a family. It didn’t even cross my mind to wonder.

It wasn’t until I was several years into my Ph.D. program at a large research university that I came to the realization that “doing everything” is one of those things that works for some – such as those who don’t need more than 4 or so hours of sleep per night. Not me. There were plenty of men in my department who were married, had children, and were extremely successful in their fields. There were far fewer women. I wasn’t the only one noticing this pattern – fellow female graduate students (the graduate students are about 80% female in my department) began commenting on this – that it seemed that if you were female, you either chose to not have children, stayed (or became) single, or your career fell apart. We watched as recent Ph.D. graduates – individuals we considered among the toughest and most brilliant in their cohorts — struggled to balance their academic roles with all their other roles. Practically overnight for many of us, the academic dream became the academic nightmare.

In 2007, I formed a support group with other graduate women in my department, and we began to talk about these issues: “Why are academic institutions so out of date?” “What are our other options?” “What can we do to encourage progress?”  We’ve gotten to the point now where we are collaborating with other groups on campus and pushing for change. The status quo is not acceptable. In this blog, you can follow along with our progress, and explore more tangentially related issues as well. I hope you’ll also let us know that you’re out there and paying attention, if only to comment to say that.

~ by academicwomen on January 3, 2008.