Glad you found my posting of interest. I found the replies to it on your site very illuminating. Keep up the good work.

Best wishes,

P.D. Lesko

I think you should work out your family and professional lives however you and your wife want to, according to your needs and the needs of your child/ren. My motto is that there are all kinds of different people in the world and all kinds of families–what works for one family won’t work for all, not by a long shot. Good luck!

(You might want to check out the Mama Ph.D. blog at Inside Higher Ed. It’s a group blog in which one of the women is the long-distance commuter away from her children, who live at home with their father.) You’ll note of course that there is no such blog as “Papa Ph.D.”–which is of course part of the problem we’re talking about.

I have been reading this blog for a few months and always find it informative. I do not want to hijack anything or violate your rules, but I do have a question for you and your readers.

So, I am a grad student in history whose wife has a phd in another field and has accepted a one-year position for next year. We have a small child. We have always planned on moving to wherever she got a job because I started after her, and will be moving this summer. We have also always been prepared to live separately after I finished. We hope to stay together, but we know that that is a luxury in this life rather than a given.

Now, this somewhat depends on the location–for instance, the availability of quality schooling is a deal-breaker–but, we have assumed from the beginning that our kids would live with me once they were done nursing. There are two reasons for this: 1) I am more suited, temperamentally speaking and being able to go without sleep when necessary, to the realities of living with school-age children, and 2) we assume that my career would take less of a hit. That is, I will get credit for having the kids instead of being seen as a ‘mommy.’ Do you think that is a reasonable assumption? Neither my wife or I like that this seems to be the way things are, but that is the impression that we get from conversations with faculty and general attitudes in our departments.

For example, when my wife became pregnant, the faculty in my department were nothing but supportive. The DGS told me to bring my child to any meetings and has never been critical of our decision to have a child while in grad school. However, with women in my department who have become pregnant, he has expressed many more reservations. He even recommended one woman not come to grad school (after they had accepted her) because she had small children at home. The thing that is most onerous about this scenario is that I do more of the day-to-day childcare of my son because my department requires far less teaching than my wife’s. So, here I do not get any guilt directed my way, but still get to be the primary parent. Male privilege, I guess. I should also say that there are women professors in the department who are dismissive of grad students reproducing.

best,

anon

I think a lot of men are decent guys (like Tom above) who are supportive of their wives’ careers, but there are an awful lot who want to have their feminist cake and eat it too (that is, pay lipservice to the values but not have to put pay to them.)

I’m glad to hear that some of your women friends are getting good offers, though.

I can certainly sympathize with the need to consider family harmony in making this kind of decision, but I have been very struck by the unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) assumption by these considerate, progressive, pro-feminist men that they won’t actually be called upon to act on their progressive, pro-feminist sentiments. It simply doesn’t ever seriously occur to them that their wives might actually get the better offer until it happens, and then they can’t handle it.

In contrast, last year I almost took a (terrible) job; most everyone just assumed she would follow, though the school offered her nothing.

I have to say, too, that I’m really tired of the commuting lifestyle. The job he found was an hour away from my school. So he drove for two years, then I’ve been driving for three years (by my choice, I like this community better). But I feel so detached from my university. Both of us have this ideal of living within walking distance of my next university…but someone’s going to have to compromise to end the commuting.

Susan–so true. Luck still has too much to do with jobs.