Yuck

This morning, I had to leave the house because the cleaning people came.  Yes, I know that folks whose opinions I respect think it’s a bit bourgeois, but I’m lazy and I love a clean house.  So I left and took some work with me to our local coffeehouse.

As I was catching up with some reading on the Chronicle of Higher Education, I came across their excerpt column in which they publish bits of conversations from their Careers Forums.  This particular exchange of posts involved a mother who had finished her PhD and was going on the job market.  She has a 7 month old who was still nursing and was wondering how she could work in pumping her breastmilk during the interview process.  Academicians can fully expect a several day interview process chock full of interview after interview.  She wanted to know how to best finesse the situation so that she could pump before she exploded.

The responses the Chronicle included to her request made me sick.  1) “Your child is too old to breastfeed.  Wean him/her and don’t mention your problem to anyone”.  2) “You may pump but when I did it for four days when I was away from my 6 month old, my milk dried up and my baby was weaned.  I felt really bad about this for a long time afterwards,” and 3) “Whatever you do, do not mention that you need to pump your breastmilk.  Don't be a feminist trailblazer. Wean your child now.” 

I stand (sit) before you now telling you that I nearly threw up.  I am disgusted and afraid of the sexism implicit in answers 1 and 3:  Do not let them know you’re a mother.  Do not let them think you have emotional, physical, or biological attachments to anyone outside of your potential employer’s department.  To carry it to an extreme, one might even say they would encourage her not to let them catch on that she’s a woman at all, much less a mother.  Answer 2 just seems to imply that you’re going to have to give up what you feel is valuable to you as a mother as part of your self-sacrifice to your job.  Do you hear the rest of the response that is left hanging “one of the many things you’ll have to give up as a woman in academia”? 

This exchange was included in an issue focused on the problem women have in academia.  The higher the prestige of a university, the less likely it is to have women faculty members.  Women in academia are less likely to have children.  Those who do have children are less likely to have tenure and those who have tenure have, at most, one child.  This is an issue with discrimination, I believe, because the same is not true of men.  A career in which a woman cannot procreate without putting her career at risk inherently has problems. 

We get tenure in academia after a six year evaluation process in which we have to prove our abilities as researchers and teachers.  This six year evaluation process often coincides with our peak procreation years, and for me, it’s pretty much my biological last chance at being a mother.  In an ideal world, having a child should have the same effect on men’s careers as it does on women’s.  But. It. Doesn’t.  

I can give my guesses as to why it doesn’t (breastfeeding, hormonal changes, hard vs. soft wired parenting instincts), but I am afraid they sound like excuses.  I can already see my colleagues watching my behavior to see if I’m on the mommy track.  I can already feel their anxiety that I’m not going to produce as much as others and they are going to have to deny me tenure.  I am already responding with pits in my stomach, massive hives across my chest, and panicked wakings in the middle of the night. 

It floored me to see my fears of sexism so blatantly displayed in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Psychology departments are supposed to be more advanced and progressive than other departments.  But it’s not completely gone.  When my male colleague tells me that I shouldn’t visit my child at lunch to breastfeed him and instead asks “Why don’t you pump?  Why can’t you pump? You should pump instead of actually breastfeeding your child” I know I’m only a half step away from being dismissed as a Mommy. 

12:04:13 PM