EXCERPTS:
Entering into girlhood in the 1990s, with Baby Spice as my hero and girl power as my mantra, I learned that girls could do anything. I was encouraged to have a strong report card, play competitive sports, and follow my professional dreams. "Girls can be doctors, too," I was told.
Around me, women's enrolment in university undergraduate programs reached parity with men's for the first time in Canadian history. Today, one of the most striking features of Canadian universities is their feminization, even at the graduate level. But, rather than being celebrated as a marker of progress, this trend has met with public alarm. Attention has turned to "failing boys," pegged as victims of emasculated classrooms. Apparently girl success should be a major concern for Canadian society.
But women in universities still face challenges and differential treatment - on questions like time to degree completion, type of institution, level of faculty appointment, pay equity, harassment, and classroom expectations. These issues are pronounced for women of colour, poor women, and mothers. Women's increased numerical representation on campuses, in other words, has not been accompanied by equal rewards for our accomplishments.
"Why the panic about women's enrolment?" I asked my (male) soccer teammates one night. The response went something like, "Because the labour force would collapse if women ran the show. They'd take the training and run off to have babies."
I cringed, but my teammates aren't far off. True to that narrative, as my once politicized friends marry and have babies, pub nights become tea parties, and the topic of chatter turns from foreign affairs to breastfeeding aprons. One by one, they enter babyland and career ambitions fall by the wayside. I don't begrudge my friends for becoming mothers; I love moms and hope to be one someday. I'm just baffled by how the tenure track and the mommy track seem so incompatible. This tension never occurred to me in adolescence, when I was encouraged to "have it all."
Historically, women's unequal footing in universities has been linked to the time conflict between degree work and women's biological clocks - an age-old problem, but one that isn't going away. I drag one of these biological clocks around with me. It's heavy.
The average age of graduate students beginning doctoral programs in Canada is 30, the same as the average age of first-time mothers. This statistic itself is not staggering. But as I sidle toward that daunting number, its implications hit close to home.
At the end of my first serious relationship, which coincided with the end of my first year of doctoral studies, I found myself surprisingly ill-prepared to deal with my own thoughts and emotions. My worry centred on economic, chronological, and biological concerns rather than to the loss of my partner. After all, I am a student in women's studies - a field of precarious employment and uncertain job prospects, especially in our current state of global economic crisis - and I relied on my partner financially. I had once consecrated this stage of life to building a stable relationship and preparing to have a child, a goal that I wanted to realize in the context of a stable partnership. Today, my devotion to my career seems increasingly at odds with my hopes for a family, and it's frightening.
Fear-mongering abounds around the "problem" of educated women's low fertility rate. Last fall, The Atlantic ran a provocative piece called "All the Single Ladies," lamenting the lack of dating options for educated women. "Where are all the marriageable men?" it asked. In November, Danielle Crittenden discussed the phenomenon on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, implying that feminism - of all things - is to blame for all the single and childless (read: unhappy) career women.
I'm awestruck. As feminist ideas figure strongly in my identity, I'm disturbed by news stories blaming feminism for the unhappiness of educated women who have presumably chosen to delay forming a family. We aren't delaying; we are delayed - by societal constraints, like inadequate financial support, 80-hour work weeks, and precarious employment (and dating!) opportunities.
Of course women graduate students are privileged. But we make choices under constrained circumstances. In the popular rhetoric of "choice," women students and career women are trapped. We're framed as "choosing" to put either our career or our family first. We're "choosing" between becoming the responsible woman citizen who reproduces and becomes the heart of her home, or the ambitious career woman we've been groomed to become since girlhood. And women who "choose" the latter are derided for being naive, misguided, or selfish.
Debunking this language of free choice helps to turn our gaze from individual women to the real, social pressures we face as a group. Social scientists have been probing the conflict between work and family for decades, and have posed strategies that have helped in other countries - like extended family leave policies, universal childcare, and job re-entry training. It's time we view these policy changes as necessary rather than idealist, and stop blaming ourselves, as women, for flailing with bottles and briefcases.
-reprinted from the Ottawa Citizen