This chapter explores how mid-career tenured women faculty, who are mothers and academics, manage multiple roles. The women represent faculty at a variety of institutional types and in a variety of disciplines. The chapter looks at these experiences in light of ideal worker norms.

This chapter draws on a longitudinal study about women faculty, work-family, and career advancement in community colleges. The study found that the participants, though highly satisfied with their careers and qualified for administration, are largely uninterested in moving to more senior administrative positions.

When is a good time to have children? Where is a good place to raise a family? Should I work full time? These and other questions are common for faculty looking to combine work and family. In this article, we use feminist theory to analyze data from a longitudinal study of women faculty to explore the critical choices women as mothers make about…

In this article we explore the role of academic discipline on the careers of tenure-line faculty women with children. Longitudinal, qualitative findings show that disciplinary contexts and ideal worker norms shape what it means to be an academic and a mother. Even after achieving tenure, ideal worker norms affect these roles; professional…

Casual observers of academic environments might conclude that women's problems in higher education have been resolved. Colleges enroll more women than men on an overall basis. There is gender parity in entry-level faculty hires, and the number of women in senior administrative positions continues to rise. A closer look however at the work, lives,…

The purpose of this article is to more fully understand the professional lives of women academics in computer sciences in six Romanian universities. The work is exploratory and relies on a qualitative framework to more fully understand what it means to be a woman academic in high-tech disciplines in a second world economy. We conducted in-depth,…

This article explores the dynamics of how female faculty members at 2-year colleges balance the demands of their faculty jobs with motherhood. Results suggest that the community college appears to be a place that offers women the opportunity to balance their interests in teaching at the postsecondary level with the demands of having a family. This…

This paper explores the interface between work and family at different types of institutions from the perspective of women faculty who are on the tenure track and who are mothers of young children. Such a perspective provides insight into institutional variation on academic life in general, and for new faculty as mothers in particular. A macro…

Biological and tenure clocks have the unfortunate tendency to tick loudly, clearly, and at the same time. The average age at which faculty earn the PhD is thirty-four, putting the tenure decision at about age forty, just when a woman's fertility is in serious decline. As more women enter the academic profession as assistant professors, more of…

Having a child creates priorities, adds perspective, and helps women to be clear about what they can do (and what they are willing to do) to succeed as a faculty member.

Given the prevalence of women faculty entering the profession, many of childbearing age, it is important to understand how women juggle the often-conflicting demands of children and tenure. Interviews with 29 faculty from research universities find them reporting joy in their professional and personal roles, the "greedy" nature of academic and…