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[kirblar]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension-policies-that-put-women-at-a-disadvantage.html

This is a similar result to what we've seen in Nordic countries- more generous family leave policies can end up negatively affecting women in the workplace as an unintended side effect. Even though overt gender discrimination might be illegal, someone hiring young people might favor young men over young women, viewing them as being less risky to take a long maternity/paternity leave.

Here, the issue seems to be simpler: Men can easily work during their paternity time provided. Women can't. Pregnancy is hard work on its own, and requires recovery time afterwards as well.

The underrepresentation of women among the senior ranks of scholars has led dozens of universities to adopt family-friendly employment policies. But a recent study of economists in the United States finds that some of these gender-neutral policies have had an unintended consequence: They have advanced the careers of male economists, often at women’s expense.

Similar patterns probably hold in other disciplines, too.

The central problem is that employment policies that are gender-neutral on paper may not be gender-neutral in effect. After all, most women receive parental benefits only after bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities. Yet fathers usually receive the same benefits without bearing anything close to the same burden. Given this asymmetry, it’s little wonder some recently instituted benefits have given men an advantage.

To combat these disparities, many universities have adopted tenure-extension policies that give new parents greater flexibility. Typically, this means extending the seven-year period of tenure evaluation, usually by an extra year for each child. In practice, these policies are usually gender-neutral, giving dads an extra year to establish their reputations, just like moms. Universities typically adopted such policies in the 1990s and early 2000s, while about one-fifth chose not to do so.

Three economists — Heather Antecol, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, Kelly Bedard, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Jenna Stearns, a doctoral student at Santa Barbara — evaluated these gender-neutral tenure-extension policies in important new research.

The policies led to a 19 percentage-point rise in the probability that a male economist would earn tenure at his first job. In contrast, women’s chances of gaining tenure fell by 22 percentage points. Before the arrival of tenure extension, a little less than 30 percent of both women and men at these institutions gained tenure at their first jobs. The decline for women is therefore very large. It suggests that the new policies made it extraordinarily rare for female economists to clear the tenure hurdle.

The researchers compiled new data on the career trajectories of all untenured economists hired over the last 20 years at the 50 leading economics departments, and coupled it with details about policies instituted by those universities that extended the tenure clock for new parents.

The authors compared promotion rates before and after these gender-neutral parental policies were adopted, relative to trends in comparable institutions that did not alter their policies, while also accounting for an array of influences, like where each economist was trained.

They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists.

Perhaps this reflects the physical toll of pregnancy, the difficulties of a complicated birth, the extra task of nursing or simply an unwillingness to shirk parenting duties. Whatever the cause, the findings are exactly what you would have expected if becoming a parent exacted a greater career sacrifice for women than men. By giving men a relative advantage, these gender-neutral policies appear to have effectively raised the tenure bar for women.

Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said these findings “clearly conform to what I see on the ground every day,” adding that “the extra year for men just disadvantages women.”

The problem, said Ms. Davis-Blake, is that “giving birth is not a gender-neutral event,” recalling that during her pregnancy, “I threw up every day.” She argued, “Policies that are neutral in the eyes of a lawyer are not neutral in fact.”

 

[devilhawk]

As a scientist myself, the timing of having kids with the most integral portion of your career is a major issue. The grants and funding mechanisms do not care about how many children you have.

As more companies institute policies that allow parents to both take leave, it will only become more apparent that it is societal and biological norms that are the issue. If a new father is using the paid leave to write grants and do research outside of work while the mother is doing the daily childcare, is it the employers prerogative to correct for the norms outside of its control? What happens when the father is doing the majority of the childcare? Should employers now be in the business of investigating the percentage of childcare each parent does and correct accordingly?