Invisible Adjunct

I think the unwillingness of men to function as wives is almost the whole story. The pregnancy and childbirth only take a year, during most of which the mother is able to work normally. As I said earlier, though, it's very hard for a same-age two-career couple to raise a family unless they have lots of family money or outside sources of help.

Zizka, can you rephrase that to explain more? "The unwillingness of men to function as wives" makes me want to flame. I forget your particulars; have you experienced pregnancy? "during most of which the mother is able to work normally" doesn't match our experience at all, and we had a low-risk and uncomplicated pregnancy.

ABD Instructor, who can't lactate

Hi ABD -- this is purely anecdotal, but my experience in grad school and when working, as well as any number of studies, suggest that Zizka may have a point. I am not talking just about childcare, either. There is some evidence that, although there are more women in the workforce than in the past couple of generations, they still do the majority of the housework, cooking, and other "wifely" stuff. I know men who actualy do the lion's share, and the Cranky Professor has a brother-in-law that is a house-husband, but in my experience, that doesn't happen that often.

When I was in grad school, almost all of the married male students I knew had wives who worked AND took care of the housework, while the married or seriously involved women had partners who expected that they (the women)would take care of the majority of the domestic load because they weren't earning "real money" and had lots of free time as grad students. Now it could be that women in academe just have lousy taste in partners, but it could also be that, overall, society gives less value to women's labour and time. I know that when I married a person with a 12-year-old in the middle of my diss, most of the people I knew (in and out of school) seemed to assume that I would be taking on a whole new role that would make it harder for me to finish -- I've never heard that kind of conversation take place when a man acquires a child.

Just my thoughts.

I admit that I have no children, and am not an especially "child-oriented" kind of person--i.e., I truly do not understand why people have them. I recognize that the question I have is neither a popular nor particularly progressive one, but that said, would someone explain to me why the difficulties involved in having a child -- say, in the early years of tenure -- should be anyone's concern? To have a child is a choice one makes,right, and with that choice come certain responsibilities and consequences. Isn't that the nature of any choice? I guess the argument people make is that they should not have to decide between having a career versus having a kid, but at the same time I wonder on what grounds they can make this claim. I can imagine one saying 'I wish I didn't have to make this sort of decision', but I cannot see what kinds of arguments one can make to justify having a child as a right.

So, without a huge flaming of me, could someone explain it to me?

Chris, I am not particularly childo-centric either myself (don't have children, don't want them particularly, but neither do I not want them particularly).

You say you cannot see what kinds of arguments one can make to justify having a child as a right. Well, I don't think having a child is a universal right - I tend to take the child's side in this, there are millions of horrid persons out there who don't deserve to have children -, but I do think that it is a quite basic quasi-right. If a person wants to have children, will make a good parent, and is aware of the difficulties inherent to the responsibility, he should find support. Children are not a luxury item.

Any deserving parent knows beforehand that having children will demand a certain degree of sacrifice, and is willing to go ahead. Society should not make things harder than they already are - after all, we do want the species to go on, I suppose? And if that means that the childless must contribute somehow - e.g. not having certain tax privileges which parents would have -, then I, as a childless person, am all for it.

The question is: should universities make it easier for people to have children and still compete in the academic world. My answer is no. Why should they? There are plenty (indeed too many by a factor of serveral thousand percent) of qualified people who would be happy to make the sacrifices needed for academic success. So why should the universities do anything? If you don't want to sacrifice for your career, find another one.

Hel-lo, people. The point here is not whether universities should make it easier, although that's a damned good one, IMO. The point is whether people who have children are penalized for doing so -- and that women, whether or not they actually *are* the primary caretakers, appear to be penalized more. Family is still often seen as a guarantor of stability for men, but a distraction for women.

Yes, having children is a choice (or sometimes an accident), but to return to the idea that academe should be limited to those who dedicate their entire beings to it to the exclusion of all else is a bit much. It was perhaps possible in a world of independently wealthy (or at least very well-paid) gentlemen-scholars, but that whole model pretty much falls into a world where students are merely an annoyance and where lectures and memorization of content form a dyarchy for the acquisition of knowledge.

Today, faculty are expected to spend much more time fulfilling administrative duties, mentoring a great many students, and teaching in a manner that is accessible to an ever-increasing non-traditional student body. Moreover, we are expected to be brilliant *and* multi-dimensional in our characters. Having a balanced life not only demonstrates that to our peers and tenure committees, but also makes us better role models for our students. This is of course notwithstanding the fact that many non-US westernized countries consider a balanced life to be a necessity, and actually do much both via direct and indirect means to minimize the conflicting tensions between work and home.

Oh -- and I can hardly see that putting a career first necessarily makes a person better at it. Anyone who has been a student or graded exams knows that there are lots of hardworking people out there who are successful, without being brilliant, and brilliant people who are never successful. The attitude that the people who are willing to sacrifice personal lives for academe are somehow more deserving of positions is bogus. Willingness to sacrifice doesn't guarantee good teaching, productivity, or any other quality expected of an academic. Empathy, however, is pretty darned important.

"If you don't want to sacrifice for your career, find another one."

Why should academics be a career that requires lots of sacrafice? I agree with Another Damned Midievalist -- working 70 hours a week won't make me a better mathematician, a better teacher, or a better citizen of my academic community.

The work-yourself-to-death ethic perpetuated in many academic circles (at least in mathematics) is part of what keeps women from choosing research mathematics as a career. I'm not willing to sacrafice my family, friends, and enjoyment of life for a position in the academy.

I hope my original question didn't leave the eroneous impression that I support:

"the attitude that the people who are willing to sacrifice personal lives for academe are somehow more deserving of positions ..."

I agree with ADM when he/she says 'this [logic] is bogus."

As I think about it, I think what prompted my query was this notion, which ADM also noted: "Family is still often seen as a guarantor of stability for men, but a distraction for women." As a male, I am fairly certain that I have been the victim of this kind of double standard in some hiring situations. And it leaves me, and many single men I suspect, in something of a no-win situation. (and please, I am not suggesting or implying that this double standard is any less debilitating on the female side of the equation, because obviously it's not)

Maybe in the end my question arsies from a pronounced and scarry degree of overall estrangement, because when I read aa's remark, "after all, we do want the species to go on, I suppose?" I found myself shrugging my shoulders and thinking to myself 'I don't really care what happens to the species after I'm dead'.

The above should have had my name on it -- I forgot to fill in the field.

Well, maybe it's an emergent behavior thing, Chris. The *species* cares what happen to the species when you're dead, and attitudes about who mates and who gets rich might be determined by so many people that they belong to the species more than to individuals. (That would explain why they don't seem to be good for enough people to maintain majority support.)

My tongue is mostly in my cheek on this one, though.

MSJ: "The question is: should universities make it easier for people to have children and still compete in the academic world. My answer is no. Why should they?"

Because a university isn't like a firm or a sport. Or rather, it shouldn't be, and to imagine that it is so is to condemn an institution that has defended the examined life (not just a successful career) for the better part of a thousand years, more if you count Plato's academy.

More pointedly, to imagine that the professor's job is merely to succeed as a professional academic (modeled on the same sort of cutthroat competitive incentives that dominate the business world, say) at the expense of being a a good person more broadly understood, is to misunderstand the role of the professor, who should lead a good and sufficiently examined life, not merely a professionally competitive life as defined by a business model of scholarly enterprise.

Or so it seems to me. And if this view of the university and professoriate persuades, then it doesn't seem much of a stretch to think that a good and sufficiently examined life might involve raising children, and trying to be a good mother or father as well as a good teacher and a good scientist, or poet, or critic.

Could we be better scientists and poets and critics without children? Certainly possible, probably even likely. We'd be academic powerhouses, devoting all our waking hours to grants and papers and experiments.

But if you want the university to look like this (and of course most of them do these days), then I suspect you see no difference in kind between the academe and, say, law firms or major corporations. That's certainly a popular view, but I'd then say that you're an enemy (inadvertent or deliberate I do not know) of the examined life -- or perhaps more plausibly, an enemy of the social good bound up with maintaining a special sort of institution that can protect, for the ages, the possibility (and the means of living) flourishing and examined lives.

"More pointedly, to imagine that the professor's job is merely to succeed as a professional academic (modeled on the same sort of cutthroat competitive incentives that dominate the business world, say) at the expense of being a good person more broadly understood, is to misunderstand the role of the professor

Then there is a great amount of misunderstanding out there because when I walk the halls of the various schools at which I teach this is exactly what I see. Ever been to the MLA?

But, with respect to the following, I am at a loss: "And if this view of the university and professoriate persuades, then it doesn't seem much of a stretch to think that a good and sufficiently examined life might involve raising children, and trying to be a good mother or father as well as a good teacher and a good scientist, or poet, or critic."

Perhaps the key phrase here is "might involve ..." Indeed it *may* involve rasing children, but it just as easily *might* not involve this. There's no necessary conntection that I can see.

I think that loren's comments could easily be extended past having children and be equally valid. Having what is sometimes quaintly called "a life" is intrinsic to being a whole person, and whole people do more good for society because they are more connected to it.

In the case of having children, or even spouses, the problem is that, while one can give up working out, or playing a sport, or some other hobby to temporarily jump the tenure hurdles, family obligations don't go away. The study that started this whole thread indicates that women who choose family tend to lose out professionally, while men more often benefit, or at least don't have to choose one over the other.

Chris: "Then there is a great amount of misunderstanding out there ..."

Indeed there is.

Chris: "Perhaps the key phrase here is "might involve" ..."

ah, so you weren't really "at a loss" after all!

Chris: "... it *may* involve raising children, but it just as easily *might* not involve this. There's no necessary conntection that I can see."

And there doesn't need to be. But if you believe in the professionalization of the academy along the lines of, say, law firms or commercial enterprises, then chances are you'll be excluding those whose view of a complete and examined life includes being a good parent along with being a good teacher and scholar.

Furthermore, you'll likely be favoring an academy where broader life experiences -- including, but not limited to, a fulfilling family life -- are not especially valued as intrinsic to the distinctive mission of the institution. And I see that as a problem, for the reasons I suggest in my original post.

Now I suppose this latter point needn't follow: perhaps we could have corporate-styled, competitive universities that provide high quality daycare facilities and progressive flex-time options and promotion deferrals, as do some corporations?

Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.

(an example: MIT recently expanded their rather modest daycare facilities to include infant care in their new Stata Center -- a few slots at least -- but instead of doing a cooperative arrangement, MIT instead signed on with Bright Horizons, along with their corporate price schedule. BH is an excellent corporate provider, but I suspect their pricing may very nearly price out grad student, postdoc, and some junior faculty parents at MIT ... oops).

And this still wouldn't address my worry that a part of the university's distinctive mission over the ages is easily compromised by the market pressures that come along with a more competitive corporate structure and associated workplace incentives.

"whole people do more good for society because they are more connected to it"

What does having a life have to do with scientific research? There are single-dimentional people who make great discoveries, just as there are well-rounded people who do the same. Being whole or having a life makes you a better person, but there is nothing about that that makes you good at research.

Someone who researches cancer (scientist not doctor) for example does not need to feel for the patients to make breakthroughs. Who cares if he/she is an alcoholic, or a bad parent? What matters is their discoveries, not their personal life. We should evaluate academics on their ability either in a classroom or in research or both. Their personal life is their own business.

"To have a child is a choice one makes,right, and with that choice come certain responsibilities and consequences. Isn't that the nature of any choice? I guess the argument people make is that they should not have to decide between having a career versus having a kid, but at the same time I wonder on what grounds they can make this claim."

The first problem with this argument is that it presupposes a neutral (as in, e.g., gender-neutral) field of operations in which people simply make their choices. This is to ignore the very crux of the problem, which is that the baby gap is a gender gap. Well of course, since we don't actually make our choices in neutral fields, we make them in social, political, economic contexts. What the "Do Babies Matter?" study found is that men with children are actually more likely to get tenure (which probably means, men with wives are more likely to get tenure), while women with children are very much less likely. So it's actually not merely a matter of choice: choose A and get X, choose B and get Y. Some can choose A and get not X but Y. Clearly, the burden falls disproportionately on women. This is not surprising: the current tenure system was designed by and for men. A system designed with both men and women in mind would look rather different.

The second problem with this argument is that it implicitly pits one type of employee (parents -- but actually, and more specifically and more importantly, mothers) against another type of employee (not-mothers) in a way that is just a little too convenient for the employer. We the employer set the terms, you the employee take it or leave it on our terms. If you choose parenthood (ie motherhood), we are justified in paying adjunct pay rates with no benefits. And hey, since nobody protests (after all, it's just mothers, and we know they're not really serious about this scholarship thing), we can then even expand our adjuntification to encompass other groups of not-mothers. Sooner or later somebody will protest, of course, but by then we will be well on our way to a total restructuring of the academic employment system.

And to reiterate Loren's point: If having any sort of life outside the firm is now seen as a luxury item, we are indeed looking at a brave new world of corporate servitude.

"What does having a life have to do with scientific research?"

It interferes with it.

Or such is a popular view.

But do you think there is only one or a few ways of living one's personal life that are consistent with good scientific research?

More pointedly, should hiring and promotion rules, and budgeting for facility development and university programs, in effect favor one way of living one's life, as a scholar and teacher, over other potentially workable life choices?

Or should they allow for the possibility that some thoughtful and creative souls might find clever ways of doing good scholarship over the course of their lives (maybe even innovative and important science), while also being good teachers, and having a meaningful family life? Should hiring, promotion, and facility planning reflect this possibility?

ABD: My sister-in-law worked up until about the eighth month. She felt OK about it, though some others were offended because they thought she shouldn't be out in public. What I meant is that the physical disruption of preganancy is NOT the reason why women's careers are so disrupted by childbearing.

"Men being unwiulling to function as wives" means that men are not as supportive of wives as wives are of their husbands. When men are supportive, it's a good thing, but they usually aren't. This goes back to a previous thread, where I said that I knew of two cases where the man took the wifely (supportive) role.

The point originally at issue was why women are expected to sacrifice childbearing for a career and men usually aren't. I think I explained it. There's a shortage of house-husbands.

As I've said before, childraising is a communitarian activity rather than a rational-self-interest activity. Because child-raising is a contribution to the world, I think that it's wrong to treat it as an expensive luxury -- even though that's what it is economically.

We were childless for 15 years after getting married, by choice. In that interval, I paid taxes to support my local schools and I was perfectly happy--indeed, delighted--to do so. I cannot say that about other uses to which my tax revenues are being put. The reason in this case is that I recognized then and recognize now, with a child of my own, that child-raising is exactly as Zizka puts it, a communitarian project, that the childless and parents alike benefit if children are raised with love and care, and equally suffer if they are raised poorly or indifferently.

However, I think some of the skeptics in this thread are raising some important points. For one, I do not think that you can make a case for academia being different in some fundamental way from other professions or jobs by arguing that a complete, happy, well-supported person is a better teacher, and that such support for parents includes differential support for parenting. I think that's true, actually, but I don't think it's a compelling argument in its own right, or at least it doesn't explain compellingly why academia should be different than anything else, given that people teach and research well enough to keep an institution going when they're unhappy, stressed or ill-supported, and given that many academic institutions don't care that much about the quality of teaching in the first place. To care about teaching enough to want to support faculty parents well, institutions would first have to care about teaching at all.

The argument about workloads and productivity in academia is also valid enough, but it's really not an argument about child-raising per se. It's more an argument that the entire metric for productivity is stupid and counterproductive in academia, that it is primarily based on quantitative measurements of scholarly output rather than qualitative judgements of worth and utility, because the business of making such judgements has become impossible under the burden of extreme specialization. It's worth railing against this vision of productivity, but for everyone at once, not merely for women trying to raise children. It's wrong from start to finish.

The argument about equity for professional women who also wish to raise children is, as I think the folks over at Crooked Timber quickly realized, necessarily a much more general social argument, and it leads either to advocating a more extensive social support system for parenting in general, to trying to produce a system that would make it a 50-50 flip whether a child-rearing family would have a man or a woman be the full-time earner, or to resigning ourselves that professional women will not be mothers if they wish to be professionals. I think the last is a bad outcome, and it's why this discussion is so important. But if we're having it about academics, it's only because academics are in a relatively privileged position vis-a-vis their employers at many institutions, and can at least plausibly imagine negotiating conditions of employment that are otherwise wildly atypical in the wider job market. (Just as near-total job security is, for example.) To really satisfyingly explore the problem behind these issues, I think we have to recognize that academia doesn't necessarily raise these issues any differently than the other major professions or corporate management do.

"And hey, since nobody protests ... we can then even expand our adjuntification to encompass other groups of not-mothers."

Well IA, I am not sure about the conclusions you drew. Is it possible that if employers were to give more consideration to working mothers, it will be unfair to women who choose not to have kids?
Not everyone wants to have children. But if say an employer allows flexible hours because someone has children, will it be unfair for people without children to demand flexible hours for say windsurfing as well? Provide good daycare for children? Well whats stopping people with pets to demand the same? I think zizka has a good point. Its a shortage of house-husbands.

I would also add that one reason to have children is somebody has to pay taxes to support all of us in our collective old age.

I would also agree with Chris that the quality of teaching and research (in whatever combination) should be the criteria for jobs and tenure. But too often that is not the criteria. Rather, it is the quantity of teaching and publication. Hence, those wonks who have the time and incentive to travel about the country giving variations of the same paper over and over again (ie: those with disposable incomes not tied up in child care or supporting oneself at some meager level) and publishing it in several different places gain a significant advantage over those who think once done well is enough.

I would also reiterate my point in an earlier post that feminist men who share child care responsibilities rarely make it to degree or successfully land jobs and thus do not figure in the disparity, although equal numbers of such women might also drop out so it may cancel each other out. But most of the "good dads" I know left the academy well before tenure was even a question.

"Not everyone wants to have children."

Every one is children, earlier in your path through spactime. You owe, help pay it forward.

"To have a child is a choice one makes,right, and with that choice come certain responsibilities and consequences. Isn't that the nature of any choice? I guess the argument people make is that they should not have to decide between having a career versus having a kid, but at the same time I wonder on what grounds they can make this claim."

I have to jump on the quote as IA.

I don't think it is a choice to have kids or not for most people (though not everybody). Procreating is what we do. Having kids was not a choice for me or my husband. When and how many, yes. But there was no question that we needed kids in our lives. Just as one's sexuality can't be chosen, having kids isn't a choice either. Being a parent is part of who I am.

Just as we shouldn't discriminate against homosexuals and feel that it is right to accomodate people with disabilities, society has to accomodate parents. That means changes in the workplace. And it means sacrifices from the childless.

And the childless benefit from the well adjusted children of others, as Zizka and Tim point out.

To compare raising kids to wind surfing is a bit insulting.

Also, I think that the business world has much more liberal policies than academia to families. The fierce competition for jobs in academia has allowed universities to fall far behind in these matters.

"But if we're having it about academics, it's only because academics are in a relatively privileged position vis-a-vis their employers at many institutions, and can at least plausibly imagine negotiating conditions of employment that are otherwise wildly atypical in the wider job market"

Huh?

Never been an adjunct or contingent employee, I guess ...

"But if say an employer allows flexible hours because someone has children, will it be unfair for people without children to demand flexible hours for say windsurfing as well? Provide good daycare for children? Well whats stopping people with pets to demand the same?"

This comes down to my point that childraising is a gift to the community and not just an expensive luxury. I agree with communitarians and some conservatives on this. (For many conservatives, of course, "family values" means the subordination of the wife and children to the husband as he struggles to survive in the free-market jungle).

I agree that well adjusted (well parented) children are a benefit to all of society, those with children and those who are childless. One needs only consider the crimes comitted by children to see the benefit of proper (whatever that is) parenting.

But..., having worked for companies subject to family leave act, there are problems with giving parents a break. Who picks up the slack? In the business world, it is the other employees, and they are not compensated for it. At least, I never was. When one of my coworkers went on leave for 12 weeks, no one was hired, even temporarily, to cover her job. That fell to another woman and myself - no overtime for the extra hours, no comp time later. I have no problem paying taxes for schools etc. I would not have a problem paying higher taxes to provide subsidized daycare. I do have a problem giving up evenings and weekends. (Although to be fair, if I had actually liked this woman, I probably would have minded less.) My point is that this is a societal problem and simply saying academe should give more support to parents doesn't fix anything. How shoudl the university provide that support? And are there other causes that are as important? Before you flame me, consider this: time off for windsurfing is a poor example, but, what if I wanted to take time off to go volunteer in an AIDS clinic in Africa? Should businesses or academia be required to give me that time? Would you resent having to cover my job as well as your own if I went to Africa for 12 weeks?

Post 9 asks "Why should academe be a career that requires sacrifice?" Why not? Most careers, if one wants to be at the top, require sacrifice. Lawyers, doctors, small business owners all frequently work long hours that harm family life. How about professional/olympic athletes? That also involves sacrifice. Not every university requires the same level of sacrifice. My brother chose to teach at a small, rural state college because he wanted to spend time with his children. The pay is lower, the teaching load is higher, but the research requirement is much lower. He had the opportunity to work at a much more prestigious school. He chose not to because of the sacrifices required. If you want to be at a research I university, you will have to make sacrifices. If you are not willing to do so, you could go to a less prestigious school. That is a choice.

I know this will not be a popular viewpoint

Sorry, forgot to add name to above post

From Laura: "Procreating is what we do."

To paraphrase Tonto to the Lone Ranger, 'what do you mean "we" white man'?

Laura,

It is nice that your brother had multiple job offers but few of us have ever been in that position. For most of us on this list, (and for 20th century Americanists in particular) it is a choice between trying to get on the tenure track at all, adjuncting, and finding something else to do.

I definitely agree with Tim Burke that this problem is by no means peculiar to the academy. And I don't think it's realistic to think that the academy could uniquely solve the work/family dilemma that cuts across all of society. But I have to disagree with (or at least offer a qualification to) Tim's suggestion that "we have to recognize that academia doesn't necessarily raise these issues any differently than the other major professions or corporate management do."

I think the academy does raise these issues differently: which is to say, scarcely raises them at all. This neglect stems in part, I believe, from the academy's self-perception is that it is more liberal and progressive than other professions. And in some respects, that's obviously true: the academy is a place where someone can teach courses on race, class and gender, write books about queering the Renaissance, and what have you. But then, I think it's important to place this optimistic picture alongside the available evidence on women's employment patterns in the academy (the Do Babies Matter study is one recent example, another source of information is Robert Townsend's series of articles and reports on employment figures in history). "What is it about our profession that exaggerates the gender gap?" asks Kathryn Lynch in her (I think pretty unrealistic) An Immodest Proposal: Have Children in Graduate School. Lynch is commenting on the data supplied by Sylvia Hewlett (Creating a Life), which "suggest that women are less likely than men to have it all -- profession, spouse, and children -- and that women in academe have more difficulty combining family and professional life than women in business, law, or medicine. Men in academe, however, are more likely than men in other fields to be married and have children." At the very least, discussion of this issue should begin with a recognition that there is little evidence to suggest that academia is more progressive than other professions, and a good deal of evidence to suggest that it is actually less so.

I also agree with Tim that the "complete, happy, well-supported person is a better teacher" argument is the wrong way to go. This takes the issue out of the realm of pragmatic policy and into the realm of utopian transformation. What's needed if this problem is ever to be addressed (and frankly, I'm not optimistic that it ever will be) is a recognition that while the problem is not unique to the academy and cannot be uniquely solved by the academy, actual workplace policies do make a difference.

Tim: "I do not think that you can make a case for academia being different in some fundamental way from other professions or jobs by arguing that a complete, happy, well-supported person is a better teacher, and that such support for parents includes differential support for parenting."

I just want to note briefly (since I think I probably appear to be the person closest to making this argument here) that this is not, in fact, what I would argue: I don't want to move from a claim about balanced lives and good teaching to the distinctive character of the academe. I agree with Tim that, while the first claim is plausible, it is unlikely to sustain such an argument.

Rather, I think there is a plausible case that the university ought to be different in some fundamental way from other professions, and the nature of that difference ought to make it easier to accommodate diverse ways of balancing scholarship, teaching, and meaningful personal commitments, especially (but not exclusively) child rearing.

But as IA points out, this is not what we in fact see on university campuses, and that seems puzzling to people like me, who believe that the university is more than just another form of competitive corporation, and indeed, who believe that this is the one place where we should see far more by way of experiments in living and working.

RE: #28 and the question of who picks up the slack --

The company should make arrangements to do so, whether it is a university or a corporation. Hire a temp. Hire an adjunct. Provide child care on-site so parents don't have to leave early.

It's not parents who make more work for their co-workers; it's an employer who insists on shifting their responsibilities onto people with responsibilities of their own.

And this need not be for parents alone, either; people caring for elderly or sick family members, on disability, etc. should warrant similar consideration.

Other industries and other nations manage this; failure to do so is not the result of parental selfishness or lack of "dedication" but rather the deliberate choice of an employer to give priority to profit over treating its employees as human beings.

As for the windsurfing/parenting argument, I agree it's a flawed analogy. Caring for an elderly parent/caring for a sick child and windsurfing/taking the kids to the beach would be more accurate comparisons. One is concerned with the physical welfare of a dependent human being; the other is for personal pleasure.

I think the problem with expecting fellow employees to take up the slack is that it's much too small a group to smooth out the effort. I've never been in a salaried group of more than, oh, twenty people who could really share effort (and more often it's been four or six). More than that and the mythical-man-month comes into play. Not only that, but one's immediate coworkers are slightly likely to be of approximately the same age, so the childrearing tends to come all in a bunch.

Expecting a very large group of people - say, citizens of a nation - to supply considerable help to all its children is moral and practical. I am all for it. But if the accounting is done in a small group, it's too lumpy, it puts too much of the cost on too few people in too short a time, just as putting all the cost on the parents does.

This seems like another symptom of being driven, or maybe led, to expect all feudal goods from a corporate employer; current parents and the currently childless are squabbling with each other over what tidbits the employer will drop. How convenient for the employer!

I'm extremely annoyed by the argument that academic parents should be subsidized because they must be becoming better people. In the first place, if true of academics, true of everyone; make it a principle for society, not just a rule for your job. In the second, if true it would be better reflected by an increase in rewarding academics for being better people (better teachers, deeper poets), no matter why.

Finally, it looks to me like a good play to increase the work benefits of the tiny class of workers now at the top - to exaggerate the differences in security, dignity, safety that we're already increasing. ("Hire a temp. Hire an adjunct." Chances that temp and adjunct work come with childcare lagniappe - nil.)

Clew -- yeah, I hesitated about posting the temp/adjunct remark. However, even though I have done both (and am currently temping) I think it is still a valid _short-term_ solution. I am not advocating AT ALL hiring someone as a full-time "adjunct" or "temp" and not giving them full benefits.

One aspect of temping that is really nice is that my employer is the temp agency, not the client. The agency, not the client, pays my salary and provides benefits. If the client does not provide an adequate work environment, I can either leave or have my agency ask for more compensation, without penalty. Adjuncting would be a lot more humane if adjuncts were not directly dependent on the company (yes, company) exploiting their labor.

If we have goals and determine to achieve them, I am sure the children is just a little obticle. I can see that women can do more than one thing at a time (you know what I mean?) That's why we get older than our ages, and just wonder why men is having younger girl friends.

"a shortage of househusbands."

Well, whatever happened to the independent, liberated, who-needs-men, self-sufficient, 'sisters are doin' it for themselves' type women who are supposed to be the norm today? Oh well, as long as women do need men after all, does that also mean that being attractive to men should be as important as career preparation?

Believe it or not there are women who are single mothers by choice.Yes that's right the "shortage of househusbands" doesn't seem to be a factor in this case.

Does the "shortage of househusbands" obstacle apply to lesbian mothers as well?