Derailed by the Mommy Track: Organizational Policies, Academic Expectations, and Emotional Labor on Academic Mothers

Introduction

Thirty-three years ago, Schwartz (1989) fueled a debate over why women were still facing inequality in the labor market. The answer was inflexible working conditions. Her solution was to divide women into mothers and non-mothers, fast tracking one group to the top of the corporate ladder and accommodating the second group with less hours and more schedule flexibility so that they could balance work and family obligations. Thus emerged the idea of a “mommy track,” or what others would come to call the “mommy trap” for the inequitable ways in which women with children were treated in the labor market (Kim, 2010).

The wage penalty women with children experience has been a major focus of the mommy track debate (Budig & England, 2001; Correll et al., 2007). Labor market motherhood penalties also include lower rates of hire, fewer raises, and unlikely paths to promotion (Benard et al., 2008; Cuddy et al., 2004). Research has also shown that this phenomenon is alive and well in academia even at a time when organizational policies designed to accommodate work-life balance have been put in place to prevent such inequality. In fact, female academics are less likely to have children than women in other professional fields, including medical doctors and lawyers (Maso et al., 2013). Forgoing motherhood seems to be an easier choice for women than finding themselves mommy tracked in the academic labor market (Jones, 2012; Stone, 2007).

One of the key characteristics that sets higher education apart from other labor market institutions is the tenure-track and promotion process. Faculty on the tenure track–typically a six-year timeframe within which junior faculty must meet the teaching, scholarly, and service expectations of their institution–must also determine what time away from these duties will do to this timeline. Not only must newer faculty think about the fiscal feasibility of time away from work, but they must also consider whether that leave will be productive enough to meet the six-year deadline. Many institutions started implementing Stop the Clock (STC) policies in the 1970s that allowed a faculty member to stop the six-year tenure clock for a semester while they dealt with their own personal health or childcare related issues (Flaherty Manchester et al., 2013; Flaherty Manchester, et al., 2010; Thorton, 2005). In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions expanded STC policy usage for all tenure-track faculty facing increased challenges due not only to facing personal or family health reasons, but for decreased scholarly productivity and service as the shift to teaching online and helping students cope with their own trauma consumed significant amounts of time (Guy & Arthur, 2020; Hermann & Neale-McFall, 2020; Kasymova et al., 2021).

In this chapter, the author explores an explanation for this continued workplace inequality in academia as the intersection of organizational policies with unmatched institutional expectations in combination with the inequitable emotional labor burden that academic mothers face. Emotional labor is a type of labor in which the person is performing a high level of care for another person (e.g., nurses, teachers, food service). Due to the nature of care work, emotional labor has also been highly feminized as something women are “naturally” good at and want to perform. Mothers on the time-constrained tenure track feel this pressure more acutely. It is by examining the intersection of organizational policies and institutional expectations that we can better understand the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of workplace inequalities facing mothers in institutions of higher education.