Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower

[00:00:00] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Hello, everybody. I’m Margaret Chowning, um, a member of the History Department, but also more relevant for today’s meeting, chair of the Moses Lectureship Committee. We are pleased, along with the Graduate Division, to present Mary Ann Mason, this year’s speaker in the Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture Series.

As a condition of Professor Moses’s bequest, we are obligated to tell you how the endowment supporting the lectures came to UC Berkeley. In 1937, University of pr- California President Robert Gordon Sproul and the UC Board of Regents established the Bernard Moses Memorial Lectureship in the Social Sciences. The lectureship honors the memory of the late Bernard Moses, a professor of history and political science at the University of California from 1875 to 1911, and an emeritus professor from 1911 until his death in 1930.

Professor Moses earned a worldwide reputation for his contributions to understanding the problems of the Latin American republics. Uh, and he was a pioneer scholar of Latin American history.

(clears throat)

Professor Moses served as a member of the United States Philippine Commission from 1900 to 1904. Past lecturers have included Herma Hill Kay, Lloyd Ulman, Nicholas Riasanovsky, George Lakoff, Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Hammel, Ken Jowitt, Carolyn Merchant, Jean Lave, and Emmanuel Saez. Now I’d like to say a few words about today’s lecturer, Mary Ann Mason.

Professor Mason is currently a professor of the Graduate School and faculty co-director of the Earl Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Mason is an influential force in the areas of family law, policy, and child custody issues. Her lecture today, in part inspired by her forthcoming book, Do Babies Matter?

Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, which according to Amazon, is coming out in May. Does that sound right?

[00:02:24] MARY ANN MASON:
July.

[00:02:24] MARGARET CHOWNING:
July.

(laughter)

Um, this, uh, book will ask why female doctoral graduates do not follow the same career trajectories as men after receiving their degrees. Drawing on twelve years of research, Mason traces the effect of family formation on women from graduate school through retirement. This follows on her more recent work concerning the issues that professional women face in law, medicine, science, and academia.

Mary Ann Mason received a PhD in American history from the University of Rochester and a JD from the University of San Francisco. After teaching American history and practicing law, Mason joined the faculty of UC Berkeley in 1989 and served as a professor in the Graduate School of Social Welfare until 2007. Between 2000– the year 2000 and 2007, Mason served as the first woman dean of the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley.

She was and is a strong advocate for graduate student diversity, equity for student parents, and career-life balance for all faculty. Her research is a foundation for UC system-wide initiatives, including the UC Family Friendly Edge and the nationwide Nine Presidents Summit on Gender Equity. Please join me in welcoming Professor Mary Ann Mason.

(applause)

[00:03:51] MARY ANN MASON:
Thank you, Margaret. I’m very honored to be the Moses lecturer this year, and to be able to speak to my family, my Berkeley family, my favorite people, and my actual biological family is here as well. Uh, where are you? You didn’t sneak out already.

(laughter)

My daughter, Eve, and my, my husband, Paul. Um, I’m particularly glad to be here because, as Margaret mentioned, this actually represents twelve years of research, and, um, you have been my experimental subjects for mos-most of this time, as you will learn. So you might be able to see yourself in some of these pictures and charts and graphs because we have been studying you and the whole C– the whole UC system.

Um, this started actually when I first became the graduate dean at Berkeley in the year two thousand. And I have to say, as an old seventies feminist, I was thrilled to see that a little more than fifty percent of the entering class were women. Unbelievably exciting to me.

Thought we’d never see this in my lifetime. The graduate students were less impressed because that’s what they grew up with and didn’t realize how different things had been. Uh, so as you can see from this, or maybe you can’t see from this because I’ve got to figure that out.

Yes, there we go. Uh, in terms of the rise of women PhDs in nineteen seventy-three, it’s twenty percent, and now it’s actually a little more than fifty percent. I got a PhD in, um, nineteen seventy-three, actually, and it was only twelve percent of my class were women, so that doesn’t surprise me.

I got a law degree after that, and only 10% of my class were women. Now, law school is well over 50%, and certainly graduate degrees in history, as, um, you know, are probably over 60% as well. So things have changed greatly.

Uh, amazing within my lifetime to see such change. And it’s not just overall, it’s also in the sciences, which everyone said was going to be stuck in wherever forever. But in fact, since 1973, you’ve seen huge growth in lots of fields.

In psychology, it’s seventy-one percent now. In– Even in the field of engineering, of all places, it’s over twenty-two percent. Coming from zero, that’s a really good, pretty good jump.

Uh, and similarly, you have geoscience and math and science are, are really going up very fast. Altogether, about a little less than thirty percent of all PhDs in the sciences are now granted to women. So this is enormously impressive progress.

Um, however, I looked around me and, uh, there are some issues here. So this is a test, and the winner either gets, um, Starbucks or bourbon, depending on your predilection. So, uh, what do you think this diagram resembles?

I mean, the figure on the right g– has got kind of a masculine hulk to him, and the woman on the right has got those little bulgy hips. It’s hard to know. Um, so what do you think it is?

Start at the top. It’s the easiest. There are two heads there.

There’s the nine eighty-seven and the three twenty-five. And this is Berkeley. And Paula, you probably know the answer.

(laughter)

Anyone else want to guess what this might be? The heads. No, actually, tenure-track professors.

We’re, we’re kind of a shrinking faculty. Nine eighty-seven to three twenty-five of tenure-track. That includes assistant as well as associate and full.

And the most important story here, though, as it is in general in higher education, are the necks. You see that women have tiny heads and thickish necks compared with the little skinny necks that the men have. What do you think the neck is?

Yes. Adjuncts, part-times, lecturers on this, on this campus. Yeah, it doesn’t include graduate students, just the adjuncts, part-time, and lecturers.

Now, the next are the fastest-growing part of higher education. Um, it’s, it’s really s- a stunning figure in the other direction, not a good direction. About twenty years ago, something like fifty-eight percent of all undergraduates were taught by tenure-track professors, and now that’s down to thirty-seven percent and going down further.

The model has been to shrink the professoriate and raise the, basically the fungible workplace, the, the workplace that is, uh, cheap and can, and can move on. Now, this is only Berkeley because we’re not really doing this with the other slides, but what do you think the three thousand and four thousand are?

[00:08:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Graduate students.

[00:08:18] MARY ANN MASON:
Pardon me? There are a lot of them. Could have been graduate students, you’re right, but it’s not.

It’s actually the staff. And the staff have… Because there are a lot of technical people, um, and people who work in the labs, the men have higher paid jobs, so those are the broad shoulders, and women not so much.

And then at the e- at the bottom, the female bulge there, there are lots of just, um, at a school like this, residence workers and restaurant workers, et cetera, who are women. So this is the face of Berkeley, but it actually is the face of most American corporations, and certainly all other major universities. I’ve had people look at this diagram and do their own, and it’s very similar.

It’s what’s happened since the feminist revolution. Huge numbers of women in the workplace, but taking the bottom half, and with some representation at the top, but not too much. Much more in the middle management, the neck positions in the corporate world and in our, in our world, it’s the, uh, basically the gypsy scholars.

Um, this is a little d-d-distressing. I knew this, of course. It wasn’t a great surprise to me, and I wanted to look at it more carefully for my students to see what was going to happen, and more importantly, for the university to see it and to take some steps.

So how– what happens to men and women after they get their PhDs? How does having babies affect tenure? Um, we had a wonderful data set to use.

Every– how many PhDs are in this audience? There you go. I knew it.

I knew it. I knew there’d be a lot of you. So every one of you, if you got a PhD before or after nineteen seventy-three, filled it out once, the Survey of Earned Doctorate.

We don’t let you graduate from the graduate division unless you fill out that survey. So that’s the base, and ten percent of all PhDs are followed through, um, every two years until they are seventy-six, dead or have left the country. It is very hard to escape NSF.

Just don’t even try. Uh, so that is a hundred and sixty thousand participants, and arguably it is the best employment longitudinal database that we have in America. You can ask questions from this database that you’re not going to find even, for instance, for doctors or lawyers.

They don’t have this kind of database. So we’re really fortunate because you can really pinpoint when and how family formation makes a difference. Ah, let’s see.

Get to this. Let’s see. Yeah.

Uh, who gets tenure? Do you see the old familiar heads and necks again? So what is it?

Well, we can see the guy on the right here. Guy, you know, we’re used to thinking he was a guy now in blue. Uh, seventy-eight percent of those who go into academia, um, of the men get tenure.

Uh, and twenty-two percent go into the second tier, full-time fac– part-time faculty, non-tenure faculty. Those are the fathers. The fathers actually, men, married men do better than anyone else in the university in terms of promoting up the ladder.

They do better than single men. They do better than single women. They do better, a lot better than than married women with children.

The women with late or no babies, um, do pretty well. They’re kind of in between seventy-one percent, and they have a somewhat bigger neck. Uh, late or no babies, by our definition, late is really about over age forty, because it’s any time post PhD, five years post PhD.

The average PhD is now given at age thirty-four, so you’re really flirting around age forty, uh, when you’re talking about a late baby. So anything over forty would be a late baby. There aren’t too many of those.

Um, there’s no difference between a late baby over forty or an early baby, but early babies make a huge difference. And this is any time, again, before about the age of forty. And you can see that the women who have the big necks are disproportionately, uh, women, married women with children.

Now, the interesting part is here’s the science world. Same pattern. As you’ll find out, things are tougher for women in science in some ways, but the patterns are remarkably similar to what happens in the humanities and social sciences.

Uh, in this case, you see smaller numbers because there are fewer scientists to begin with, so the heads and necks and whatever are disproportionately, it’s two thousand, three thousand, and three thousand, and then the men have the same big heads and same looking neck. In this case, however, the women with later or no babies in science do not do that well. They actually have a lot of trouble getting tenure, even if they don’t have babies, and those who have babies do pretty miserably, fifty-three percent to seventy-seven percent.

So this is the way academia has been playing out, um, and it hasn’t changed much, these, these, these kinds of images, probably for the last ten years or so. It’s been, it’s been fairly stable. Now, look at it in a different way.

It shows a kind of a time, a timeline here of falling out of the pipeline. And this is again, everybody. It’s not just the scientist.

And you see the biggest, the biggest leak in the pipeline, and this is true in science as well, is before taking that first assistant professor job, women are likely to drop out, as you’ll see in a moment, as post-docs or change their minds as graduate students. They have already set– decided, “Hell no,” “I won’t go,” and don’t take that. It’s the pool problem, as we call it, because when you’re trying to hire up for a new position, you find you don’t have as many women applying for it proportional to the numbers.

So this is a familiar one. And then women are twenty-eight percent, twenty-seven percent less likely to become associate professors. In other words, they just don’t get tenure.

And women lag in on those, those, um, slow, slow years of being an associate professor forever. So, oh, twenty percent less likely after sixteen years of being an associate professor to be a full professor. So you see it all the way up.

But for women in general, it’s really the younger years, the postdocs and the graduate students, where you see the biggest change. They just don’t enter the pipeline at all. And here you have– No, I’m going the wrong way.

Here you have women in science. Now, the interesting part about women in science is that they– single women actually take that first job, that first tenure track job, just about in the same proportion as married fathers do. So they’re really on an even keel up to that point, and then single women take a big tumble and don’t get tenure.

But the interesting part about it, it’s not just the mother effect. There are more complicated things going on in science. Uh, I think the–

I have been studying science, the women scientists now for the last two or three years, and the complexity of the implicit bias and the stereotyping and the, and the, um, the gender, gender discrimination are, are really quite serious in the sciences. They are across the board, but not quite as much as in the sciences. And in the sciences, mother– married mothers are thirty-five percent less likely than married fathers to take a tenure track, and married mothers drop out twenty-seven percent less than married fathers with young children to become tenured.

So scientists take a bigger hit, no question, with motherhood. Uh, but it’s not just scientists who take the hit. The patterns are there.

It’s just tougher in science, and I think the women are there– Are there women scientists in this room? Is that your perception? Yes, it is.

And I think women scientists get much more discouraged at an early age, so they’re more likely to drop out, which is what we’re really trying to aim at. Um, these are postdocs. Now, in the UC system, we have just about as many postdocs as we have doctoral students in all the system itself, uh, about eight thousand of them, I think.

And the most dramatic thing, we actually have tons of data on our UC postdocs because, in addition to the survey of doctorate recipients, we did several original studies. This is where you’re probably part of it. How many are faculty members here?

There we go. In two thousand three, there was a UC family survey, which became our backbone and has been brought up to date really by the climate survey. And then in two thousand and five, we did all the doctoral students.

How many doctoral students are in the office? In the office?

(laughter)

Okay, you might have done this, or you might not have been here in 2005. And then in 2007, we did the postdocs. We have this whole series.

Again, the biggest data set for these classes of workers, uh, of any in the United States. No one has that kind of data for graduate students, postdocs, or faculty. Uh, that gives you a kind of a, a heft and power.

But it’s a distinct, distinct drop-off there. Forty-one percent who have a new child since they became a postdoc say they’ve changed their opinion, and they’re no longer going to become a research scientist at an academic institution. Forty-one percent Versus, um, fathers who become children.

Who become children.

(laughter)

I didn’t say that. Who, uh, who have children,

[00:17:23] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
right, right.

[00:17:25] MARY ANN MASON:
Um, and those who had children previous to a postdoc, again, you see a big slide. They just find that the postdoc years just too tough. Other kinds of criteria when we measured, the women with children are far less likely to go to conferences, which is the lifeblood of networking and getting a job.

They’re far less likely to, uh, have a good relationship with their mentor, which is not very helpful either ’cause your mentor is the person who, who most helps you through life. So postdocs have a serious disadvantage and show it by just dropping out of the, of the, um, out, out of the pipeline. And for women, for scientists, I think that’s really critical because we spend about half a million dollars, at least, to educate, the federal government does, to educate scientists through their PhD and their postdoc, and then they leave just because we don’t do much to help them stay.

It’s a, it’s a, really a, uh, not a very good use of funds. Um, and this is our graduate students. Now, you all, I’m sure know the graduate students quite well.

Um, they changed their career goal as well. We did a snapshot, but we asked them, “Have you changed your career goal since you entered?” And at the beginning of entering their postdoc program, not the postdoc, their graduate program, women forty-six percent wanted to be a professor in a research institution.

But if they had a baby, and these are all women in the sciences, that number absolutely plummeted to eleven percent, basically getting rid of all the mothers who had babies as doctoral students. For fathers, the beginning number was fifty-eight percent, and that went down to forty-five percent. So it had an effect, but not, not the drastic effect that childbirth has.

So childbirth is really the major reason, I think. why in certainly the sciences, the women do not look as strong as men going through the pipeline. They start out pretty well, thirty percent, and then they go down pretty rapidly.

Okay. Um, now here, these are our own sweet graduate students, and you’ve probably heard remarks like this, or maybe you haven’t. The women all Uniformly, uh, in just the off, the comments, the free, freehand comments.

I want to be able to have a family, have children, enjoy being a mother and wife, which are close to impossible when one chooses academia. The clock is ticking, and it will not stop for anything or anyone. Um, and then here we see the, the guy fed up with the narrow-mindedness of supposedly intelligent people who are largely workaholic and expect others to be so as well.

He’s sick of it, too. So both men and women change their mind, but women more than men, and almost always for family reasons, a significant difference in that regard. And it’s true that both men and women, the majority, believe that their university, which is one of our UCs, is not at all family-friendly, so we don’t have a, a good, uh, example.

How many of you have had women graduate students say, “I don’t wanna live your life”?

(laughter)

Yes, we’ve had that exactly. Doesn’t do well as an, as an example. So here’s a repeat of this first part of the study.

Again, this is over m-many, many studies and over several years, but just compiling it together. Married mothers are thirty-five percent less likely to enter tenure-track jobs than married fathers. Married mothers are twenty se-seven percent less likely to achieve tenure than married fathers.

And mothers often make their decisions early. Twice as many men– women than men are likely to change their career goal away from being a research press-pressor when they have, um, babies as postdocs. High percentage of mothers slide into the second tier, the NEC, the part-time adjunct and lecturer corps, the gypsy scholars of the university world.

You know, I was a gypsy scholar for a while. Anyone else been a gypsy scholar in this class? There you go.

You go– It is the least well-paid, least respected, high educated discipline in this, in this country in terms of a job. It’s, it really is just at the bottom of the bill. No respect, no money, no continuity, et cetera.

And yet you find so many women and men, but largely women doing it because it’s really the only way they can continue on in the university or think it is. And then, uh, after several years, we’d gotten this pretty well organized and figured out when women were dropping out, et cetera. Uh, it occurred to me, and several others actually, uh, that there was another important question to, to address.

That equity was not just, uh, looking at the numbers of women compared with men who get tenure. It was also looking at the family formation of those professors. What did women have to give up if they wanted to go all the way?

What did the… What was the effect of career on family formation? Taking the question on its head.

And here you see it even more drastically than you see in terms of the numbers. Uh, these are across all fields, tenured faculty. And the discrepancy between men and women is huge.

Married women with children, forty-four percent, uh, Married with children, 70% for men. Women are twice as likely to be single. Um, the only group that is more similar are married without children.

But the marriage penalty– not the marriage penalty, the, uh, tenure penalty for, for, uh, fertility is, is very high. And here you see it in the sciences. This is a better drawn diagram, and you get the scale of it, ’cause as you can see, the women are a little teeny ball up there, a little teeny satellite around a huge moon ’cause the men are much larger in science.

When you see it this way, you see both the numbers and the fact that there’s a discrepancy, a double, a double gender equity issue, a discrepancy in, uh, in having children. So here in sciences, it’s seventy-three percent to fifty-three percent. Um, interestingly enough, women scientists are more likely to be married than women in the humanities and social sciences.

Um, anyone have a guess of why that might be? The numbers are good. But the proportion of numbers are good.

You’re outnumbered by men all the time, so the odds are good. But as they say, the goods might be odd, as they say in Alaska.

(laughter)

But nonetheless, so they have a little bit better advantage in terms of being married mothers actually than, than fathers do. And so many of them al-already dropped out that it’s, um, you’re not seeing, of course, the whole m- The whole thing.

Single mothers eight percent, uh, and married without children fifteen percent. Basically, uh, getting divorced is also an area with a lot of discrepancy. As you can see, latter-ranked women are the most likely to be divorced, and the least likely to be divorced are the second-tier women, um, because they’ve chosen that life, because they can’t afford to be divorced, I don’t know, but it clearly is a different, a different pattern for, um, second-tier women.

And th-this is really quite interesting. It’s the, um, the census data, and it compares women faculty with women lawyers to women doctors. And women faculty are really much less likely to have children, as you can see.

Doctors, however, women in medicine do almost as well as all college-educated women, and that seems to be contradictory because we know how hard it is and what the time dimensions are for women in medicine. Uh, but as one of my friends said, who was a resident at the time, she said, “Mary Ann, we just have to put in the hours. We don’t have to get tenure.”

So by the time they’re in their residency, they don’t have the pressure of publication, which is a very different kind of thing for, for women, and they also have something to look forward to. I think medicine is really unrolling itself as being a far more flexible career track for women. They have a lot of HMOs or places like Kaiser where people can work fifty percent, sixty percent, and still have high status, high salary, et cetera.

It’s also true that women are more likely to be family doctors or things that are not high, high prestige like surgeons, et cetera. So there’s a little bit of a second-tier effect, but nonetheless– And they actually earn fifty percent less than men because they work fewer hours, but still they can maintain their career and not be washed out.

Only five percent of women doctors actually leave practicing medicine, uh, which is quite astounding. And they have more children. They have more children in part because they’re also richer.

This is the problem with, um, what’s the name of the woman in, in, uh, who just, who just– The woman in Silicon Valley who took the job while pregnant. What’s her name? It says right.

I mean, she has a baby, and she says there’s no problem here, but then she also has a staff of God knows how many. So this is– and Sheryl Sandberg as well. So it’s very easy for women who are in that position to say, “Of course you can do it.

Just lean in. Just lean in. Just take it.

Just, just be tough about it.” Um, and I think most academic women do not have that luxury, unless you’re married to someone in Silicon Valley, which most of us aren’t.

(laughter)

So again, the years from, um, twenty to thirty in all professions are really the make or break years. You have to make it in your profession, whether you’re a lawyer or a doctor, but even more so as an academic, because you don’t usually get a second chance. If you don’t get tenure, uh, you’re likely not to stay in the academic market, and it’s a very intense and clear five, six, seven years.

So although it’s, it’s true in all professions, it’s even more intense for, for women in the academic profession. I call it the make or break decade. And now you can see in terms of childbirth here, The little long line there is the higher date.

And at that age, most people are around thirty-five these days, thirty-five, thirty-six. And then you see the men and women. These are the, the years in which they have children.

This is the percentage of children they have. Now, men have children, babies, early and often, and through their assistant professor years, right to the right of the higher date, they have a lot of children. Uh, women come more slowly, and only one year do they make a big burst, and that’s four to six years.

That’s the tenure year. They’ve got their case in, and now it’s time to have the baby, and then after that it goes down fairly quickly. So the tenure year has been the most popular year.

The problem with that is the tenure year is comes later and later than it did in the past, so it’s often over forty, and it’s waiting quite a long time. So you see that it goes down very quickly. Now surprisingly, how can this be?

Twenty or more years past being hired, you have a little boomlet here on the right at the end of the curve. What could that possibly be? It’s all men, too.

(laughter)

The second marriage, yes. A familiar, a familiar story. Although I have to tell you something.

I’m not going to talk about retirement, but the one factoid of retirement which is kind of interesting, there isn’t much difference between men and women in terms of the age at which they retire, with the exception of those who still have children in the household, don’t retire. Can’t ever retire. And that is largely going to be men.

So there is– That’s the only differential you really see at the, at the end of, uh, at the end of the career. Um, see here, here again, just, uh, summing it up, only one in three women without children who takes a fast track university job ever become mothers. That’s if you enter a tenure track job without children, you’re not likely to have children.

It’s also because of the age and other things. Women are far less likely to be married with children than are men, fifty-three percent to seventy-three percent. Women who achieve tenure are more than twice as likely than men who achieve tenure to be single twelve years out from PhD.

Now I’m, I’m really sorry there’s students in this audience because this, this is when the hankies come out. It just sounds so hopeless. But you will see there is good news following this.

It’s not, not as bad as it seems. Um, and if married, women are significantly more likely than men to experience divorce or separation.

(gasp)

Oh, now it’s getting sadder. Women faculty were more than twice as likely as men faculty to indicate they wish they could have had more children. That was actually from our UC faculty survey. Uh, now can you read this?

(laughter)

I can’t believe I forgot to have children.

(laughter)

Now, most of you probably don’t remember the 80s, but those of you who do, this was a shirt that was very popular, and it was a backlash against the feminist movement. You know, you’ve given it up. You’ve given up motherhood.

And I mean, the thing that’s sad about it is there’s still some truth to it, more than some truth to it, that it hasn’t quite worked out the way that we had hoped it would in terms of having children. Having it all, as they say, is, is very difficult. And, uh, we are making progress, though, as you will see.

Um, I think I went the wrong direction. Oh, no, I’m just recapitulating about the family status of tenured faculty, all field. Um, that is– it’s a double equity problem because it’s both the number of women who are full professors and al-also the family configuration of those who are.

So it’s double trouble as I think of it. And here again are the women scientists with their little orbs going around. Um, so until we actually reach equity in both areas, we can’t say that we have reached any kind of equity in terms of the university world.

Now, what are your next steps? Um, the good news is we actually, the last ten years have been very active ones for Berkeley, for the UC system, and for pretty much all universities. There’s been a lot of positive action, and things are happening every day, and largely good things to make the workplace more flexible, to change the culture, and to try to keep our women students in the pipeline and not let babies derail them.

Uh, this is compiling altogether all the many kinds of workplace strategies, and I’m happy to say that Berkeley now has pretty much all of them. Um, we have, in terms of leaves, parental leave for mothers and fathers. As you probably know, there’s an active service modified duty of one semester for mothers– uh, two semesters for mother and one for dads if they are significant or generally fair, fair about the distribution of childcare, and they have to be doing it at least, uh, fifty percent of the time.

And as you may have noticed in your department, the men are taking this. This is not something that is u-unappreciated or unknown. Um, we have centralized funding for maternity or parental leaves.

That was important as well because some departments resented very much if they have to pay money to hire lecturers, so that was made part of the, part of the original deal. And these are all part of a number of initiatives that started in 2003, 2004. After we’d published our initial studies, uh, it became a very important political campaign to take this to Atkinson and then to take it to the chancellors and then to take it to the deans, et cetera, to sell the fact that we wanted to have centralized, flexible, family-friendly policies.

And we put in place a great number of them between 2004 and 2005. Um, there was a real fight over some of these. The one that was most contentious was the part-time tenure track.

And now for family reasons, you can have a part-time ten– pre-tenure or post-tenure track of up to five years. According to Regents’ rules, you have to be, you have to have tenure by the time you’ve been in here ten years. So that’s sort of the upper limit for, for pre-tenure.

But for post-tenure, it’s usually five years, sometimes it can be longer. People have family needs all during their life. They have them met with their spouse, with themselves, with their families, et cetera.

So it’s a lifelong issue. And that’s the way we actually managed to get that through because, uh, the faculty were convinced that they also might have needs for themselves or their spouse, et cetera. Not so much for the babies.

Certainly the men were not thinking so much that, but they knew that that would happen. And we were very definite about getting some sort of parental leave or recognition for fathers because when we did the two thousand and three survey of faculty, we found that there had been some good policies on the books way from the nineteen eighties. But 52% of the mothers who were eligible didn’t know they existed, and something like 70% of the dads didn’t know they existed.

So mothers rarely took them, and if they didn’t, they said it was partly because those who did know about them, they were afraid that they would be considered not, um, a strong player, that men would be, that it would marginalize them. And men didn’t take them at all. It was just kind of an unknown thing.

So in order to change it, to, to allow women to do it, we want men to get in there. So much of this has been focused on men as well. Stop the clock for promotions.

That’s pretty much the default. Now, you have to ask to keep it going. So most people do take stop the clock.

Not, not all, but most do. And the same thing for fathers. Uh, and the, the part-time track, as I said, is for mothers and fathers.

When we first looked into this, ’cause there wasn’t, it wasn’t clear that there was a part-time way of doing this, we found that on the ten UC campuses, there were a very large number of part-time professors. But were they mothers? No.

They were largely, uh, engineers or chemists who were starting their own company, and they wanted to keep their door– foot in the door and keep their half-time job, but also start their company. Very, very prominent, um, pattern in many of the departments. So we thought if they can do it, everybody else can do it.

So we did the part-time pre-tenure track, and the battle came down to, well, how do you actually judge them? And finally, the Academic Senate, the, the sen– the system-wide Academic Senate decided in its wisdom that as long as they had the same kind of publications they would if they came through in a normal time, then they were up for tenure. It wasn’t going to cut down the number.

Numbers were the same, they just could do it in twice the time if they wanted to. Um, childcare, we have worked very hard on childcare, everyone does. We have the wonderful new childcare center at Haste.

Uh, and we have gotten dependent care travel grants, uh, for both for faculty and for graduate students as well. And in terms of graduate students, childcare is a real problem, um, particularly infant care. We do give, at this university, a five to seven thousand dollar student bonus for the parents, student parents to be able to use as they like, which helps alleviate it.

Um, and they, a number of graduate students have their babies in the infant care center. And emergency childcare, this is new, but it is enorm– Most of these things are not that expensive, actually.

In fact, when, um, we were looking at maternity leave for graduate students, um, I took it to Bob Birgeneau, and I said, “You know, we, we can do this. “It’s, it’s not gonna be that much money.” So, “Well, how much money is it?”

And I’m no mathematician, I promise you, but on the back of the envelope, I’d figured out the number of graduate students who were likely to have babies that year, and we have a lot of graduate students, but still the number is relatively small, and the little bit of money it would cost, since it’s only for six weeks and they have– they’re paid almost nothing anyway, so it was going to be fairly small. So altogether, I think it came out the highest possibly could be fifty And the lowest was gonna be 15 or something.

He said, “Let’s do it.” ’cause the money just is not that big. There’s always this notion that somehow we can’t afford these things, when in fact, most of them are very affordable.

All these things are fairly affor-affordable. Emergency childcare, the same way. It’s quite affordable, and it gives peace of mind, I think, to all, all mothers on campus.

Um, having the rules alone don’t do you much good, as we discovered in 2003 when people weren’t using the policies and there was no acceptance of any kind of flexibility for, uh, mothers or fathers. So what… Policies alone do not work. You have to make room for fathers.

Uh, all policies are entitlement, not s-not request. In other words, you don’t have to ask your department head if you want to have maternity leave or if you want to be a, uh, part-part-time pre-tenure track. That is an entitlement to you.

It’s like you have Christmas Day off and you have Thanksgiving Day off. Uh, it’s not something that you have to fight about or, or beg for. And centrally funded, if possible, because then again, the department chair will be much happier.

Deans and Chairs Toolkit. Aha, we have it. Creating a family-friendly department, Deans and Chairs Toolkit, and this was developed here at Berkeley for all ten campuses, and it has, um, we’ve used it at recruitment time, and we’ve used it at, uh, retreat time for the deans and chairs every year.

So they actually know what the policies are, which is enormously important. They know what the problems are. There’s a little, they, they research in back, and then they know what the penalties are, which I’m kind of a believer in as well.

They know that the, uh, provost at the University of Oregon had to pay four hundred and ninety thousand dollars to a woman, uh, when he said, I think it was the provost, he said, “With two children, I don’t think it’s appropriate that you have tenure,” or something of that blatant. Rarely do you hear anything that blatant, but when you do, that’s it, there is a penalty for it. But the idea was, it’s not just the nice, good thing to do, it’s the legal thing to do, and there are consequences for not doing it.

Uh, so this has been a very successful book. People have used it all over the country and just filled in. It’s online, so they just fill in their own, in, uh, documents and their own policies, and it’s, it’s been used all over the place.

And, um, well-advertised, publicly posted expl-explanation of benefits for all levels of scholars. I think we do that pretty well. Uh, for all these levels of scholars, you’ll find it on the web.

There are things that are not, not on the web, which I’m going to talk about because we don’t have them yet. One is the dual career policy. Uh, many universities have pretty strong dual career policies that they actually advertise or at least say what the, what the parameters are and the rules.

Dual career, which I’m sure many of you can appreciate, uh, is what keeps women often from getting jobs because they’re following– they’re the trailing spouse, and they don’t get the job. But it’s also the thing that makes it hardest for provosts and deans to hire anyone because so many people come as dual careers. We don’t do a great job with that at Berkeley.

Other universities do because they are expanding or have more, they have more land, I think, among other things. But that’s a very important one as well. Um, and a high-level administrator and a legal counsel responsible for advertising and enforcing the policies.

Well, we do have Angie Stacy and others in the office here, and they’ve been very good about promoting these policies, So I think we do very well with that. And Sheila O’Rourke is very tough on these policies as well.

She was one of the people who pushed through the Office of the President our, our initial, uh, competitive edge. Now here is my favorite poster boy. Those in the history departments will recognize him.

Uh, this is Mark Brilliant. He’s a professor of history here, and I sat next to him at a dinner at Paula’s house, actually, and he mentioned that he had been so happy with the policies that he put it, an acknowledgement in the front page of his new book. First I knew about it.

I don’t think he knew who I was either, but when Max– I– ac– Ezra Max Brilliant was born in two thousand eight, I was able to enjoy him as much as I did during my first year– his first year without risking my career, owes in good measure to the architects of the UC Family Friendly Edge program. Wow. They designed enlightened policies that children of all working parents should receive as Ezra did, and for which I’m very grateful.

I don’t think these programs get that kind of evaluation very often. That was– I mean, just, it just, it’s, it’s a good example, though, that here’s a father who really took advantage of it, really appreciated it, and will help ch-change the culture because it is a dad doing it. Um, now I want to talk just a few minutes about the kind of best practices and needs that scientists, women scientists have, which are somewhat different.

Um, although ultimately there’s a lot of la– overlap. Women scientists are, for the most part, supported by the federal agencies, and the federal agencies, until very recently, have done almost nothing in fr– in, in terms of family-friendly initiatives. Only now is NSF and, uh, NIH jumping up to the plate a bit.

But as you see, many of them do nothing at all, like, uh, discount caregiving resumes and grant reviews, or provide instructions to peer reviews on family accommodations, or collect data on gender and family status. I’ve been working with NSF. In fact, I was on a, um, a Skype with the congres-congressional committee this morning, pushing the agencies to take some initiative in this, because when they see that they’re losing their, their students, they, maybe they should do something about it to work with the universities to do more in terms of the thing that I think would make most difference.

They do now offer supplements for the lab, for the PI, for anyone who gets pregnant, so they can pay someone to replace them. The re-entry postdoc is what we really need, Because how many of you are scientists here? Yes.

Do you have the notion that if you drop out for five years, you’re just dead, brain dead, dread dead to science, can’t possibly be revived? Yeah. I don’t think that’s so true in law or history, but it certainly is the, the atmosphere in science.

But if you had a year-long or a half-year-long postdoc, could you rev up your mind again? I think so. We just haven’t done much of that.

So a-as a routine part of not losing our women scientists, to let them stay out for a while, which many need to do with– in raising children, but to let them come back as well. We’re losing a huge amount of brainpower, um, and social capital for, for our universities. But there are many of these d-very different issues.

This was another, another survey that we took of all the 13 major agencies who support science, uh, in universities and, and colleges. It includes NIH and NSF are but the biggest, DOE is pretty big, and down to USDA. Um, and since then, there has been some movement to try to get them together.

NSF has tried to get the, the different agencies to talk to each other. NASA is trying to do this. Obama is trying to do it.

He has been very tough on getting the universities to get together and do Title IX and save women from whatever. So he– we– It’s a good time for this, and I’m, I’m hoping This is really where I spend most of my time now is with these agencies, that they will be more proactive because that’s where the money is in science, and the rules make it almost impossible sometimes for women. I think the first R01 is now given at age forty or something like that, so it’s, it’s a very long, hard road, and if you have a child, it’s very easy to get knocked off it.

Um, and this is what the AAU universities, the sixty-two major research universities, do now for, for graduate students, post-docs, academic researchers, and faculty. Only thirteen percent of these sixty-two give at least six weeks paid leave to women graduate students for maternity. I’m proud to say it’s Berkeley and one other.

The other is Princeton, who also actually give parental leave t-to men. Uh, postdoctoral fellows, twenty-three percent. Um, that’s not very good either.

Postdoctoral fellows are in– have a problem because sometimes they’re considered employees, as they are in the UC system, which does give them guaranteed leave. They are staff. They have the same kind of rights.

Most of the time, they’re considered trainees and have no policies at all, so they are really floating there in a gray area. Academic researchers, eighteen percent, and faculty get fifty-eight percent. Have a long way to go on all these fronts, but particularly those, uh, the two on the left are the most vulnerable populations.

They’re the ones who are most likely to lose, uh, and very little has been done for them. Ah, now we’ve come to my favorite topic, which is new. In the course of studying women in science, which is– we’ve been doing more for the last three or four years, we’ve found many things, but one of the things that I kind of stumbled on is that Title IX actually has very strong prohibitions against pregnancy discrimination.

It is very strong. How many of you knew that Title IX covers pregnancy discrimination? You do, Bill, because

[00:45:06] BILL:
Absolutely.

[00:45:07] MARY ANN MASON:
you did know. No, I don’t think so. Uh, even the Title IX coordinators often don’t know that.

It’s, it’s really quite shocking. But it’s very clearly there in the regulations, it’s starting to come through the case law, and it really could transform certainly the childbirth issue because they have very strong regulations here altogether, no discrimination in false pregnancy, termination, et cetera, in education program or activity, in employment, this means TAs, RAs, post-docs, et cetera, and medical coverage. You have to treat, uh, childbirth as a temporary disability and pay for it with the insurance as you would a temporary, uh, disability.

And if the student’s health coverage covers gynecological care, it also must cover pregnancy and childbirth. So there are really strict rules about what insurance will cover, uh, how you must not be left behind, and basically the rules say that anyone who has a child, which is usually a woman, um, must, must, be given the leave appropriate, determined by her doctor or whatever, and must be returned to the same place with no disadvantage. That includes an educational program.

So if you have to drop out of s- for six months and you’re a postdoc or a graduate student, uh, you can’t be kicked back or let go. You have to be reinstated and catch up or do whatever, but they have to accommodate you. If you have a job, they have to take you back after six months or six weeks or whatever and not lose status.

These are very strong regulations, and I think they haven’t been really found because they’re probably, uh, kind of difficult for universities to want to have to, to, to face. But now, interesting, I just looked at the website of our own w-wonderful Berkeley before I came because I had seen it before, but I’d kind of forgotten. I c-

I, I Googled in Title IX and, um, discrimination and pregnancy discrimination, pages and pages about Title IX on our website and athletics and what the rules were, were, et cetera. And then we have a whole Title IX sexual harassment office. So sexual harassment has been the new frontier, but now the new, new frontier is definitely going to be pregnancy discrimination.

And this is what Obama said, “We’re going to have Title IX compliance. It must be compliance. He went on and on about it.

The NASA guidelines, which he recommended, actually include a big section on pregnancy discrimination. So it’s just around the corner. This is my…

As I said, this is my mission. A number of other people, once they learn about this, are, are interested in it too. Um, because it would provide a lot of coverage.

As I said, often graduate students and postdocs are not considered employees. They’re considered trainees, et cetera, in all the, all the aspects of their work life and in their education, life, and medical coverage. So you’re going to be hearing more and more about this.

Uh, you have to have a timeline coordinator. We have one, but it doesn’t cover pregnancy discrimination. Complaint procedure, dissemination, and self-evaluation.

These are the keys to get going. So hopefully we’ll be doing that soon at Berkeley. Uh, here is one biology graduate student: “Once I got pregnant, I felt that my advisor no longer considered me a serious scientist.

He gave me an easy, not very important project and spent much less time with me.” Um, you hear this complaint a lot that, particularly in the sciences, that pregnant women feel they, th-they’re no longer taken seriously. Now, that’s very hard to do, to prove.

It has to be intentional discrimination, all kinds of criteria. But just knowing that there is a discrimination policy and that we don’t, we don’t accept discrimination, like we don’t accept sexual harassment, which changed the workplace, I think would be an important step forward for, for women in science and everywhere. Um, this– No, actually not this pre-presentation.

There’s a video presentation. We have an NSF dissemination grant, an advanced dissemination grant, taking all of our research and best practices over the many years, and Joan Williams is my co-PI. She runs a center called Work-Life Law.

She’s done a huge amount in creating new family responsibilities, discrimination, um, and gender bias things. So together we have about eight of these, which are just coming online next week, actually. Do Babies Matter?

They’re fifteen minutes long. They’re a video with, you know, wonderful, wonderful, hmm, PowerPoints and pyrotechnics, and also some extra, uh, teaching materials to go along with them, so anybody can use them anywhere. And they’re free.

They’re gonna be on our website next week. Do Babies Matter? Four Patterns of Gender Bias, uh, Ensure They Don’t D-Derail Your Career.

How Does Your Workplace Me-Mess-Mea-Measure Up? Mess up is a good term. Double Jeopardy: Women of Color in Science.

This is really kind of unique and new. She, uh… They interviewed sixty women of color in science, and she came up with some really quite interesting patterns.

Some things are illegal, including pregnancy discrimination, uh, and other issues. And it’s cheaper to keep her. This is an analysis of, uh, what family policies cost, what it costs us to lose someone, what it costs to retain someone, what it costs us to recruit someone.

And it was started at the University of Iowa, but right now, our very own Clair Brown in the economics department is carrying on this study because we have some good data about things that have been in place and have worked and how much they cost. And it’s– these are difficult correlations to make, and we haven’t had these policies for too long. But we’re already seeing good things like… this is, these are my grandmother’s baby pictures.

Since two thousand and three, the percent of babies born to assistant professors has doubled, women. No children in two thousand and three, and now they’re– uh, excuse me. No ch– Seventy-three percent had no children in two thousand and three, and now in two thousand and nine, uh, only thirty-six percent have children.

I think we kind of left that off there. 2009 is the, was that. For men similarly, no ch– sixty-one percent in 2003, and now it’s only forty-one percent.

But the real, the real doubling has been with women assistant professors. Now I consider that a victory, and it’s clearly just our new policies that have made it all work. I take full credit for it.

But we have– This is what I mean by changing the culture, where people feel it’s okay to have children, and at least in the law school, because you have a lot of young faculty, um, you see the men and women often talking childcare talk in the hallway, which is, I, I think pretty healthy for young parents to be able to do that freely and not feel, feel that they are restricted in any way. So I’m, I’m very, I’m very proud of that. Um, no, let’s see.

Gotta go the other way again. Actually, I think that was kind of the end of it. I’ve lost it.

But I just wanted to say, the last thing I wanted to mention, uh, Uh, the book is coming out, not actually in May, but in July. Do Babies Matter: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower. And this is the life course book that I mentioned.

Uh, some of the– a lot of the information you heard today is in it, of course, and then it takes us from graduate school years through finding your first job, through falling in and out of the tenure track, uh, and the second tier, through getting tenure, through going through the associate, and then finally the retirement years. And then with a whole lot of suggestions along the way and at the end, uh, for how to change things. And as I said, my heart has been in doing more for graduate students and post-docs, because again, you see the most serious dropout at that point.

But the book really talks about all the different, different areas of, of your life. Your… This is your life, so if you wanna read about your life, this is it, Do Babies Matter?

Uh, I have to say, it’s pretty serious stuff. I mean, hopefully we wrote it in a nice easy way, but it’s got a whole lot of graphs and appendix at the end, you know? You don’t have to read this.

Well, thank you very much, and I’m ready for, for any quick questions.

(applause)

No questions? I don’t believe this.

[00:53:01] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes. Thanks. Um, it seems like a lot of your dataset comes from California, which is fantastic. You have a really large dataset, and it looks like you found lots of really cool trends, and I’m wondering which of those trends, in your opinion, would have changed if you had a nationwide dataset?

[00:53:18] MARY ANN MASON:
Well, actually, most of this does come from the nationwide da-data set, the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which is everyone. And then some of the, the ones about postdocs and graduate students, um, are more from our, our own surveys in California. But of course, we have huge numbers, so these are very important.

And I think we’re pretty representative of research universities, um, because otherwise, if you’re not a research university, you’re not having postdocs and, and, uh, graduate students either. So I, I don’t know that that’s, um… I, I don’t th-think that’s so far off.

Many other universities have used this data and these, these slides and such, and they seem to feel that it, it, it works pretty well for their university as well. So but that’s a good question. I think it’s, I think it’s okay, though, from what we know.

And the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which is most of this, uh, is clearly everyone, not just, not that you see. Yes, sir.

[00:54:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, thank you for that. And as, um, as a young father and a gypsy scholar at the moment, especially appreciate it. Um, especially, um, I certainly am very familiar with when I have gone off to look with, after my little daughter and pick her up and things, there’s definitely a sense that I get from other staff of…

They wouldn’t say it, but they would, they, there tends to be an implication of, “Well, wouldn’t your, shouldn’t your wife be doing that?” They would never say that, of course. Yes.

But, uh, there’s always that sort of implication. But, um, one thing I wondered was whether your data was affected, um, or whether the percentages changed or how it was affected in places where perhaps teaching was valued more than research. Um, and how much is this perhaps to a certain extent an indictment on the, uh, the domination in a way of the research ideal rather than teaching or perhaps-

Yeah, I- thinking about the balance there.

[00:55:09] MARY ANN MASON:
Right. I think that’s a very good question. And in the original survey, the graduate students rated, uh, four-year liberal ar-arts colleges to be a whole lot more family-friendly.

But the truth is, our survey really does cover them as well, the, the, the big general survey about when people drop out, et cetera. And there, there isn’t that much difference between them at that, at that stage. Um, but because we are geared to graduate students and postdocs, these are people who are probably going to go on to research universities more likely at any rate.

But it’s a good question. And by the way, thank you for taking your daughter and just being a good role model, because I think it takes a lot of courage for men to do that. But again, once you have three men carrying around the Snuggie, then, then they all get used to it, and it becomes just ordinary.

So just becoming ordinary is what you’re what, what we’re aiming for.

[00:55:55] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
And ordinary and employed.

[00:55:57] MARY ANN MASON:
And employed, yes. So you’re the gypsy scholar now. Yes. Well, uh, I hope, I hope… There actually is some hope for gypsy scholars because a lot of, um, good percentage, it’s in the book, do get hired out of that to a regular job. Just not necessarily in the place where you’re the gypsy scholar.

[00:56:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Um, I was wondering if you could measure any effects based on the career of the other partner.

[00:56:22] MARY ANN MASON:
Um- Yes. Oh, there actually– there’s a whole thing, I can’t remember all the numbers, but they’re in the book about dual career couples.

And not surprisingly, um, women are more often the, the trailing spouse, um, and have more trouble than men do. However, that– having said that, there are about thirty-eight percent of all couples, it’s the men who are the trailing spouse. Uh, and they probably have even more trouble because it’s hard for their ego not to do this.

Um, there was a good, a good survey that came out of Stanford, and the numbers are just not clear in my mind at the moment. But it is a real difficulty, uh, for, for women. Uh, whether or not they have children, it’s a, it’s a, a difficulty for women.

[00:57:07] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Uh, yes, uh, thank you. Uh, actually, my, my question very much relates to this one. I was wondering to what extent you can separate out the, uh, the effect, the, the, the baby effect from the married woman effect and-

[00:57:23] MARY ANN MASON:
And, yeah,

[00:57:24] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
and the, you know, the, the problems of being a, an yes, particular problems of being an academic.

[00:57:30] MARY ANN MASON:
You know, I didn’t put it in the slide because it gets too complicated, but in fact, in terms of not getting the first job overall, women with children are twenty-eight percent less likely not to get that first job, but married women are twenty-one percent less likely than single women not to get that first job. So it does have a strong effect at, at that particular stage. Later on in your career, marriage is actually a help if you’re going from, if you’re getting tenure, if you’re going through s-your associate professor years, I guess it’s stabilizing.

And older children are actually a help, too. But it’s those first vulnerable periods of childbirth and getting the first job that really throw women, and some men off the track, but more, more, more, more, m- more women than men.

Good question. Thank you.

[00:58:19] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Uh, I was wondering if there was an effect about what kind of jobs women accept, like if they go for the higher prestige university- Yeah, like the research tier or the teaching tier, kind of more what he’s asking.

[00:58:29] MARY ANN MASON:
Yes. No, I think actually it’s a good question, and you kind of saw that, if you remember it, in the graduate students changing their mind. Um, well, that one was when they had children.

But overall, women who, um, are much more likely to think that liberal arts colleges are gonna be family-friendly. So I think they, they do. In fact, I had a talk with the, in the biochemistry department a few years ago, and they were all gonna go off to four-year colleges.

And I, I kept on telling them, which I think is true from the data, it’s not that great. It’s not that much more family-friendly. You’re gonna have the same, the same issues in terms of getting tenure, et cetera.

But they do perceive it as being more family-friendly and will more likely make that choice, uh, than men will. Uh, any of you, uh, ever taught in a small college like that? Is it, is it family-friendly?

(laughter)

No. Okay. Maybe you haven’t. Yes. I think she has a question.

[00:59:21] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you for the lecture. Uh, you give, give, give us, uh, more about the difference of the, of the babies affected the, uh, affected the men and the women in the university. Uh, and also you– at the last, you gave many of the strateg-strategies, strategies how to solve this question in the American, you know, I mean, American.

Um, but, uh, I think how many of the strategies is only the, uh, technical, only the technical, technical meaning. Only, uh, only a ma– um, a mention, only, uh, uh, only a little, a little bit, a little strategies to, to, uh, to change the situation now. No, to change– not the root, not the root strategy, not the root policy to change the situation.

So how– what is, uh, uh, what is the ways to change the situation in the, uh, level, like the state level or, or the mind, or the mind level,

[01:00:23] MARY ANN MASON:
like trying to change the mind, you mean?

[01:00:24] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah, mind. Yeah. Like the men and women can also do some the costs, do some cleaning the, the floors or other things.

[01:00:32] MARY ANN MASON:
Sorry.

(laughter)

Well, that’s okay. I’m, I’m not sure I understand everything, but changing the mind and heart as opposed to just the technical interventions is what you say. And I, I, I always think of the civil rights movement when people said you can’t legislate morality and you, you couldn’t make people less racist just by passing laws.

But ultimately, when you live with new rules, you come to accept them, and it does change things. So the rules themselves do change the, the nature of how, of the mind and heart if you keep, if you keep trying all the time and not let it go. I’m not sure I understood the rest of your question, but is that, is that okay?

(laughter)

(unintelligible)

[01:01:11] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah, she mentioned strategies.

[01:01:13] MARY ANN MASON:
Okay. Uh, well, this, uh, okay. Strategies.

Guys, I actually showed you the best practice, but didn’t show the, how the strategies to do it. The most important thing in my experience is to make sure that you get the head, the head leadership in back of it. Uh, we started with Atkinson, who was the office of the President, and he, he verified it, so the, the chancellors kind of have to step in line.

You had, and this is a big system, so getting the whole thing to run together was very difficult. And then when we did the, um, UC faculty survey, it was kind of a bonding experience because we sent it out in Atkinson’s name, that you must fill this out and sent it back. And of course, we got a paltry response ’cause faculty don’t ever fill out surveys, et cetera.

So then we sent it out again in the chancellor’s name. We got a few more back. Sent it out in the dean’s name.

We kept on going back and forth and trying all the authorities we could, and then finally, the payroll officer sent it out and said, “You will not get paid unless you’ve sent this in.”

(laughter)

Now, I’m teasing about this, but I’m not about getting the higher leadership involved. Um, ’cause otherwise it, it might bubble up from the bottom, but you’re not gonna make any progress at all unless you get the, the, the, the head chancellors and the head deans and such on board. So a lot of, a lot of politicking, a lot of political work to get them.

I mean, no one’s gonna say anything against motherhood. They just didn’t want to pay for it, and they don’t want to be disrupted, and they don’t want to do this, and they don’t want to do that. So it takes some effort to get people to change their, their, their, their strategies and their, their ways of thinking.

[01:02:37] STUDENT:
I know this is probably a very, um, individualized question, um, but considering that I don’t wanna wait until I’m 40 for a science PhD, when would be the best time in the career track, do you think, to actually start having children?

[01:02:51] MARY ANN MASON:
Are you a graduate student now?

[01:02:53] STUDENT:
Yes.

[01:02:53] MARY ANN MASON:
You know, I’ve written about this. I write a chro- chro- a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education. And, um, I always think the graduate school years are probably good years because you actually have more independence than you’re going to have elsewhere.

The main problem is the money. But s– yes, exactly. Um, but if you can get decent childcare and whatever, a community that’s really like-minded, people who live in family housing here, I mean, it’s really quite, quite a wonderful community.

Uh, and you’re not as pressured because you can take longer in your graduate program, particularly since we stopped the clock for all graduate students at Berkeley, so you can take up to an extra year to finish your program. Um, now, of course, it would be better if you had them when you were in college probably, but people don’t. Just in terms of, you know, being able to, to not be disruptive to your life.

But the graduate school years seemed to me to be not a bad time. Um, that’s, I, I… My students are always a little shocked that I say that, but-

(laughter)

[01:03:50] STUDENT:
We’ll see how my, uh, husband feels about that.

(laughter)

[01:03:57] JANE:
Thank you, Marianne, for a really interesting talk.

[01:03:59] MARY ANN MASON:
Thanks, Jane.

[01:04:00] JANE:
Um, as a demographer, I just want to bring biology into the picture and note that oftentimes people want to have children and in fact can’t at older ages, and that so that I, I don’t know whether you investigate that at all as a kind of element of the m-model that you put out there. But, uh-

[01:04:17] MARY ANN MASON:
Yes, over forty that ch-

[01:04:18] JANE:
It’s clearly— Your fertility— But even in the 35 to 40 range. Yeah. I mean, as… It, it’s an, it’s a, it’s a pic- part of the picture, so–

[01:04:24] MARY ANN MASON:
Yes, it is. It’s an important part of the picture.

[01:04:26] JANE:
It’s biology as well as social science. And I know it’s obvious, except that people don’t always think it applies to them.

[01:04:32] MARY ANN MASON:
I think you’re right about that. Uh, I went to– I gave a talk at the, uh, Haas Business School a couple of years ago, and it was sort of a general talk. At the end, I asked for a discussion, and one woman said, “Well, how do you feel about freezing your eggs?”

And I thought, well, I hadn’t really thought that much about it. And then it turned out that pretty much all the women in the room had thought about it. And in fact, someone had priced it, and someone knew someone.

It really took over, the freezing eggs conversation, because this was very much on these women’s minds, that they, they didn’t– they had to make their career first, and they had to figure out some way to do it. And in fact, there was an announcement just a couple months ago from the America something or another association, that it was no longer considered risky to do so. So that’s a whole…

I, I hate to recommend it, but it’s just amazing that it seems to be… These people are very aware of it. They’re thinking about it, uh, um, not– doing more than thinking about it, they’re doing it, some of them.

It doesn’t have a very good rate though, because eggs, um, unfortunately do not freeze as well as sperms, so they, they, um, get blistered more than you want to know, I’m sure.

(laughter)

[01:05:36] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Um, as you can see, I have my baby here with me.

(laughter)

[01:05:41] MARY ANN MASON:
Oh, good.

[01:05:41] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, so I’m very interested in this topic. Good. Uh, I’m a PhD alum from Berkeley. So, um, my question was whether there was any data about, um, being pregnant while on the job search.

[01:05:56] MARY ANN MASON:
Yeah. It’s, it’s a delicate topic. Yeah, because, I mean, people can always just lie and say that wasn’t part of our decision, but-

[01:06:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes, uh, I was interested if you’ve, you know, asked faculty, or, you know, asked- who’ve served on search committees about that?

[01:06:10] MARY ANN MASON:
Yes. Uh, it’s, it’s a delicate thing, and I’ve had any number of graduate students ask me, “What do you, what do you say? Or do you say something about this?”

Or the fact that you have children at all. Of course, you don’t have to say anything about the fact that you have children at all, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid the fact that you are pregnant. Um, if you are that pregnant and can’t be avoided, then I think there’s no way to, to avoid it, just to bring it up front.

Once you get an offer, uh, any place, then you can, um, ask them right away as, as part of the, the bargain, “What are your f-family-friendly facilities?” “What can I expect for childcare?” “What can I expect for help?”

et cetera. “So it becomes part of the bargaining process.” But the early part’s difficult, because you’re right, people are never gonna say, “I’m not hiring you because you’re pregnant.”

That’s a very difficult thing. And they’ve done studies that, no question about it, women who have children are less likely to get hired for different kinds of jobs, et cetera. Um, but the most…

I did have a wonderful story about this. There’s a woman, uh, Anna Westport, who, um, I knew her. I’d interviewed her actually f-for a different book when she was pregnant, and she marched off to the University of Illinois, very pregnant.

She said, “I got the job,” and they gave me a whole semester off before I even was there for childbirth,” et cetera. So, you know, sometimes I think things are changing. That’s the point.

Things are changing. We called our program The Competitive Edge because we wanted to say that if you actually have attractive policies, it would be much easier for you to recruit and retain your faculty. And to some extent, that has proven true.

One of my favorite moments as dean was sitting next to a young faculty member at a l-lunch or something. Never met him. He’d never met me.

And he said to– He, I asked him when he’d come. Campbell, he and his wife both came from, uh, MIT, and they were both offered jobs there, but they came to Berkeley. And I said, “Oh, why did you choose Berkeley?”

“well, because you have family-friendly policies, and we, we are thinking of starting a family.” Well, that was, that was music to my ear as he didn’t know anything about me, but it does– it is, it is an attractive feature, so if you put it in the market context sometimes, it helps universities get over their reluctance to spend the money or the time, et cetera.

[01:08:08] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Well, um, thank you very much, Mary Ann. Really a topic close to the hearts of many people in this room. I can see lots of nodding heads and, uh-

Yes. So, um, thanks very much. Uh, I hope everyone will join us for the reception, which is probably back behind this wall.

So we have to go around the corner, is that right? And down the, the dark hallway, but at the… Am I wrong?

[01:08:38] STAFF MEMBER:
Well, actually, um, our caterer– we’re, we’re working with a new caterer, and they had a bit of a delay. So as you can hear, they’re actually setting up right now. It’ll be about three or four minutes, and then we’ll open these doors.

So feel free to chat among yourselves, and the minute the food’s out, we’ll open the doors. I promise.

[01:08:54] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Oh, you’re gonna open these doors.

[01:08:55] STAFF MEMBER:
Yes. Okay.

[01:08:55] MARGARET CHOWNING:
Thank you.

(applause)