Listen, My Children...: A woman's right to choose

April 24, 2006

A woman's right to choose

Yet again, we get complaints that Harvard is not the place to raise a family:

many female professors say they are especially concerned about what they call Harvard’s lack of attention to gender equality when it comes to child-bearing.

All complaints phrased in suitable terms, of course. Typical of Harvard, though, there are professors who think it would be unfair to provide benefits to Harvard faculty with children:

Dean for the Humanities Maria Tatar, who has two children currently enrolled at the College, says tuition cuts [for faculty children attending Harvard] might raise equity issues for professors without children.

You see, if you haven't got any children, you can't take advantage of the offer, and that's just not fair! (Best to remove maternity/paternity leave as well, and also the option that permits spouses of grad students, but not random friends, to live in grad student housing.)

In 2005, Working Mother magazine ranked Harvard as one of the 100 best companies for working moms. Among other perks, the magazine cited “six university-sponsored on-site or near-site facilities” for child care.

But the magazine “seemed to miss the bigger picture,” says Martin, who is also senior adviser to the dean of FAS on diversity issues and FAS’s representative on the University-wide Faculty Development and Diversity Committee.

There are six Harvard-affiliated child care centers in Cambridge and Boston. But Martin says the centers’ waiting lists are so long that most professors’ children cannot gain admission.

[...]

According to Martin, Harvard’s provisions for the care of faculty members’ children do not compare favorably to those made by other schools.

So I've heard time and again. All why I was strongly advised by so many Harvard faculty mothers to go elsewhere!

(As for Harvard's other difficulty -- I'll grant her the possibility that she didn't have the book with her and open while writing her own. There are several novels that I can quote from, from memory, and I do so regularly. Probably I use the same turns of phrase fairly frequently. So, I'll allow that her statement may be wholly accurate. Yet, one would think that she'd had enough of the "cite every thought that comes to you, and, if you're not sure whether it's your own thought or not, look it up!" instruction in Expository Writing freshman year that she'd have had the sense to say, hmm, that sounds a bit familiar, let's see if I just made it up or, if not, where it's from.)

Posted by Adrianne Truett at 07:01 PM in Academic Bell-Jar | Permalink

Comments

I don't know if women faculty have a real complaint here or not, although rumors have reached my ears that some Harvard faculty moms are finding it difficult to get tenure at Harvard. Don't know if that's because of Harvard's long-standing aversion to tenuring talented junior faculty or if there's a real discrimination problem. I suspect some of both.

In terms of child care, the real problem is for graduate student parents, male and female. Grad students aren't paid enouhg to get childcare on the open market but waiting lists at Harvard's child care centers are too long to be of much help (my friends' daughter finally got into a Harvard day care center...after she started kindergarten). If some improvements are made for faculty access, perhaps that will help grad students as well. We can always hope.

Posted by: Rebecca | April 26, 2006 at 05:45 PM