Mid-Career Challenges in Australian Universities: A Collaborative Auto-Ethnographic Narrative

Introduction

Gender inequities are prevalent in Australian universities. Inequalities in women's and men's academic careers are not new (Varpio et al., 2021; Nikunen, 2012; Valian 2005; Probert, 2005). The “academic parent”, predominantly female, struggles to meet performance expectations of self, supervisors, colleagues, and other stakeholders in today's modern world. In Australia, women continue to carry a much larger share than men of caring for others, both as unpaid carers in the family context and as paid carers in the Australian workforce (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2018). When women return to study or work after a career break, they are likely to do so “within the constraints of their competing responsibilities for households, partners, children and possibly other family members” (Stone & O’Shea 2019). Although universities are leaders among Australian workplaces in implementing policies to support parents, there is evidence that formalised institutional support, if not adequately designed or implemented, is sometimes ineffective or not accessed (Roberat and Erskine, 2005; Armenti, 2004), and can (re)create gender inequities (Marsh, 2015).

Drawing upon the authors' collaborative lived experiences, this chapter aims to define the meaning of a mid-career academic in Australian higher education and inform the reader about academic institutional structures, including opportunities for career progression. The authors' own narratives of career experiences and progression reflect on children, career, the pandemic, and the everyday conflict when balancing academic duties and caring responsibilities for the self and others.

The challenge of balancing work and care is not unique to women in academia. Women in professional careers face many of the same issues as academic women, particularly when the expectations of their workplace require long hours of work and long lead times on projects (Choroszewicz & Adams, 2019). What sets apart the experience of academic women is the combination of insecure work while maintaining an ongoing flow of research outputs in order to maintain career progress leading to heavy workloads at a time when many women have significant caring responsibilities.

In the Australian work environment, Australian universities have been at the forefront of implementing gender equity policies and supports, including parental leave, phased-return-to-work, on campus childcare facilities and flexible working practices (Marchant and Wallace 2016; WGEA 2018). These policies and supports are available to both mothers and fathers, although they are not uniform in their application between genders or across universities and are intended to keep careers on track during the period that academic parents are raising families or undertaking other caring responsibilities (Roberat and Erskine, 2005).