Critical Thinking, Traditional Living

This Chronicle of Higher Education study is a couple of years old now (2003), but I just came across it. It examines parenthood among male and female academics. The differences are truly stunning, really dramatic by social science standards. Most academic women have no kids; most academic men do. Only 1/3 of women who got an academic job without already having kids ever will. More details:

On getting tenure:
*The worst time for women who pursue careers in academe to have a baby is within five years of earning a Ph.D., the study found. Women who do have babies then are nearly 30 percent less likely than women without babies ever to snag a tenure-track position.
*Of those women in the study who had babies early on, only 56 percent earned tenure within 14 years after receiving their Ph.D.
*Meanwhile of men who became fathers early on, 77 percent earned tenure. Of men who never had babies, 71 percent got tenure.

Post tenure:
*Men who took a university job without children were 70 percent more likely than their female counterparts to become parents, the study found.
*Only one-third of women who took a university job without children ever became mothers.

While on the tenure clock:
*Only 44 percent of all the tenured women in the study were married and had children within 12 years of earning their Ph.D.'s.
"70 percent of tenured men married and became fathers during that time period.

When one considers how much more scheduling flexibility an academic job permits than most professions, these differences become even more surprising. Of all jobs, academia ought to be more, not less family-friendly for both women and men. But I suspect male and female academics are no more similar in their parenting patterns than male and female doctors, lawyers and managers. And, I'd suspect that across fields the more competitive the job (top-ranked university, big law firms, academic medicine, Fortune 500) the more pronounced the male-female discrepancies in life patterns.

What's the role of self-selection here? Are academia and other professions attracting untraditional women who don't want kids? The same jobs are, of course, very attractive to traditional men.

The biggest irony, to my mind: academics are much more liberal than other professions in their political inclinations. More academics than other professionals think of themselves as "critical thinkers" who question established social patterns. Yet in their personal lives academics aren't different than other professionals. Full-time male professionals tend to have families with kids; female professionals tend not to. Female lawyers and managers can be as "traditional" as they want to be in their political and economic views; chances are, they won't have traditional private lives. Male academics can be as unconventional as they want to be in their outlook, but they're as likely as anyone else to live the way their parents did. The social patterns reproduce themselves, regardless of what individuals think.