Beware the specter
Is motherhood compatible with an academic career? (Best of)
Toward the end of Nancy Reddy’s brilliant new book The Good Mother Myth, she describes an awkward encounter with her dissertation advisor. Reddy was newly pregnant with her second child but also in her final year of a PhD program and preparing for the academic job market:
“I stayed after [the meeting] to nervously share my news. ‘I’m pregnant again,’ I said, due in May. [My advisor] stood across from me and blinked, not responding. ‘So I’ll be visibly pregnant by the time I’m going to [a major conference] and campus visits,’ I added, to clarify why I was sharing this personal information. If he responded, I don’t remember it, which is better than the responses I’ve heard from other women who got pregnant in grad school.”
Reflecting on the interaction later, Reddy wondered why she felt this was information she needed to share with her advisor, “whose role it was to support my scholarly work and my career.” Ultimately, she concludes that she’d “accepted the suggestion, implicit everywhere, that my body was a liability, and that as his student, my success or failure would reflect on him, too.”
When I sat down with Reddy for an interview (coming soon!), I asked her about that interaction. Though my situation isn’t identical—I’m a tenure-track professor rather than a graduate student—there’s plenty of overlap. I, too, felt nervous to tell senior colleagues about my pregnancy. Rather than wind down my scholarly work, I’ve felt pressure to cram as much in as possible, as if to prove that I’m still a serious scholar, that motherhood won’t distract me from my research.
To be clear, none of my colleagues has been anything less than extremely supportive. Most have children of their own, and many have plied me with offers to drop off lasagna or cover my classes in the event I deliver earlier than expected.
Reddy’s experience was similarly positive, and yet both of us had internalized the notion that motherhood would be perceived as an academic career-killer. Our discussion reminded me of a 2021 paper by sociologists Sarah Thébaud and Catherine Taylor, evocatively titled “The Specter of Motherhood.” It also reminded me that I wrote about this paper—nearly four years ago (!), when I was still very much on the fence about parenthood and TDD was but a fledgling newsletter.
What follows is a lightly edited version of that original post, which makes clear that Reddy and I are far from alone in our fears. Nor are we wrong to worry – about others’ reaction, or about how motherhood might impact our career trajectory. While our experiences were largely positive, many other women in academia are not so fortunate. And the data on gender differences in rate of promotion within, as well as attrition from, academia, point to more detrimental effects of parenthood on women’s than on men’s academic careers.
Still, I buy Thébaud and Taylor’s argument that overwhelmingly negative cultural narratives about academic motherhood simultaneously devalue motherhood and discourage women from pursuing their professional dreams. As I write below, I really don’t think the problem will be solved with re-branding alone. But a more balanced narrative—of motherhood as enriching scholarly life, and of scholarly life as flexible enough to make room for mothering—certainly wouldn’t hurt.
One night at the family dinner table, I remember calmly informing my parents that I would likely never have children of my own, because I didn’t think motherhood was compatible with my career plans. For context, I grew up in a small, socially conservative suburban town. My mom, like most of my friends’ moms, quit her job once my sister and I were born. She devoted much of her time to sewing homemade Halloween costumes, chaperoning every field trip, and dreaming up clever craft projects to occupy us on rainy days.
In my adolescent mind, there was no way to square my burgeoning career aspirations (at the time, I believe I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, or perhaps by this point I had moved on to my international relations kick?) with the requirements of good motherhood as I’d seen it practiced. Sure, I knew a handful of mothers who worked, but even as a kid it seemed to me that their jobs were secondary to their husband’s, and that motherhood was (or was supposed to be) their true calling. That’s not what I wanted for myself, so I figured motherhood was off the table.
This memory of my dinner-time declaration resurfaced last week when I read new research that gave a name to the fear that began haunting me as a kid and lingers today: the specter of motherhood. Based on their interviews with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) PhD students and post-docs, authors Thébaud and Taylor argue that this ghostly figure looms over many women even before they have children of their own. Both male and female interviewees construed motherhood (but not fatherhood) as “in opposition to professional legitimacy and as a subject of fear, repudiation, and public controversy.”
Put in more colloquial language, they expected motherhood to be a career killer. And as a result, the female students tried to hide or downplay their plans for future childbearing to avoid losing credibility in their advisor’s eyes. If they already had kids, they went out of their way not to talk about their caregiving responsibilities, lest colleagues think they were slacking in the lab. Some of the interviewees knew women faculty with children, but this did not assuage their fears: instead, they doubted many of these women were actually good mothers, because they assumed it wasn’t possible to succeed in academia while being present for your kid.
It would be one thing if the specter of motherhood was only a narrative based on outdated stereotypes about science as a “boys’ club.” But Thébaud and Taylor offer suggestive evidence that these ideas about motherhood have material consequences. Specifically, they suggest that one source of the “leaks” through which women in STEM exit the career pipeline may be their fear that they will have to choose kid or career. If you worry that trying to combine motherhood and science will either undermine your scientific credibility or lead you to be a neglectful parent, well, it stands to reason that some women might preemptively look for an alternative career.
In a small, interview-based study like this one, it’s rarely possible to say with certainty that one thing caused another. Usually, after qualitative researchers propose a mechanism linking a cause (in this case, the specter of motherhood) with an effect (exiting academia, or perhaps choosing not to have kids), quantitative folks will jump in to test the theory on a larger, more representative sample or via a controlled experiment. But when we juxtapose Thébaud and Taylor’s findings with other evidence, it seems safe to conclude that the specter of motherhood indeed looms over many women in ways that likely shape their decision-making about career and family.
For instance, my friend Holly Hummer is writing a dissertation on women without children.1 Her findings are still preliminary at this point, but she’s hearing from some interviewees that something like Thébaud and Taylor’s “specter” played a role in their decision not to reproduce. These women seem to anticipate the physical, emotional, and cognitive load that comes with bearing and raising a child, even for women with supportive partners, and calculate that the costs outweigh the benefits.
Another interview study of young, childless, different-gender couples found a sharp gender discrepancy in who does the worrying and strategizing about how the couple will make everything work once kids come along. Surprisingly, it’s the men. Just kidding, it’s women! (With a lot of this work on gender and parenthood, there isn’t a ton of suspense about the big-picture findings; it’s in the nuances where things get interesting...) And in the process of trying to figure out how parenthood will fit with their planned careers, these women sometimes preemptively downshift in their paid work even before any babies are born.
If this phenomenon is sounding familiar, it may be because you read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Somewhat famously, Sandberg was inspired to write after one too many of her younger female colleagues soft-pedaled their career ambitions in anticipation of future family responsibilities. Rather than preemptively take your foot off the gas, Sandberg argued, the pre-motherhood years are the optimal time to “lean in.”
So-called Lean-In Feminism has been widely, and rightly, critiqued for turning a social problem into an individual problem and for ignoring the central role of economic and racial privilege in determining who is able to lean in. What holds women back is less a lack of ambition than a lack of sufficient paid leave, access to high-quality childcare, partner support, and so on.
In other words, the specter of motherhood is, in many cases, much more than a specter. Women who recognize this and choose not to have children or to proactively seek out a more family-friendly career are not necessarily selfish or unambitious—just pragmatic.
In recent years, we’ve made considerable progress in expanding little girls’ imagination of their futures. We tell them to dream big and envision themselves as a scientist or a CEO or even president. But at some point, many of those little girls will figure out that it’s hard, for women especially, to combine a “big” career with the kind of family life they may want. Getting the specter of motherhood to dissipate is less a messaging or branding problem than a policy problem. We’re going to have to invest a lot more into making sure that motherhood need not be something to fear.