A professor in the graduate school of social welfare and former dean of the graduate division at the University of California, Berkeley, Mason is a national expert on child custody issues and family law and policy.
Through her research on family life patterns in academic professions at UC Berkeley, Mason has found that although significantly more women are entering graduate and doctoral programs across the country, men still hold the majority of tenured professor and full-time positions in the academic world. The reason for this discrepancy, Mason said, is that most women leave the professional career track before becoming tenured, choosing instead to become mothers.
“Women are entering Ph.D. programs with a plan to establish a strong academic career,” she said. “Unfortunately, most of these women change their minds when they realize that it's too time-consuming in the current system to have a baby and work in such a demanding field, and they are forced to choose between the two lifestyles.”
Most women seeking a tenured position feel they must postpone having children until later in life, Mason said. Women who start families earlier are likely to quit the tenure track and settle for part-time or adjunct positions in the academic world, despite their true career aspirations, she said. The pressures of academia affect not only having children but also social lives and relationships; mothers in full-time academic positions have the highest divorce rates among those in academic careers.
Although these findings may seem discouraging at first, especially to women hoping to start families, Mason sought to reassure the audience that progress is being made. “It is only by bringing forth this knowledge that we can begin to re-evaluate current graduate programs and academic professions to impart feminine-friendly change,” she said.
Mason said that the most effective way to make academia more family-friendly is to change the minds of those who inhabit it.
“We need to rid people of the stigma associated with having children while pursuing a demanding career,” she said. “We don't want people to believe that a career in academia is a full-time life choice.”
To change this impression and make an academic career more inviting to women with families, Mason is pushing for family-friendly initiatives at colleges and universities. These initiatives include such ideas as paid childbirth time for graduate students, expanded daycare and family student housing options and granting extensions for academic milestones to individuals with a new child.
The administration at UC Berkeley has already implemented many family-friendly initiatives in response to her research findings, Mason said. The active service-modified duty action, for example, grants graduate students who are new parents up to two semesters of time away from their work without academic penalty to better establish their families. UC Berkeley also gives individuals starting a family up to a one-year extension of the tenure track to prevent new parents from growing discouraged about their prospects for academic success.
Mason said she hopes that other universities will soon implement similar ideas to make academic careers more accessible to younger individuals with families.
“Instead of believing there is no good time for children in an academic career,” she said, “I want women to believe that any time is a good time due to the full array or resources available to support academics.”
For more information, visit [http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu].
Article by Nicolette Blubaugh, AS '08