Fertility, Childrearing & the Academic Gender Gap

Childfree women remain prevalent among university-based academics in the English-speaking countries. Despite the increase of women in academic positions over the decades, their fertility rates and family/personal lives continue to differ from those of academic men. Academic women have lower marriage and fertility rates than less educated women, and especially those in tenure-stream positions are more likely than men or women part-timers to be single, separated/divorced, childless or single parents. Drawing on the author’s interviews with university-based academics in Canada in 1973 and New Zealand in 2008, the paper argues that despite forty years of changes in gender relations, social policy and institutional practices, integrating teaching and research with child bearing and child raising remains far more problematic for women than for men. The interviews show that many academic women recognize and seek to avoid the challenges faced by their colleagues who combine full-time work with motherhood. The paper concludes that equity advocates need to pay more attention to the perpetuation of gendered families when attempting to close the gender gap