4 TheGraduate • 2007

A shared enterprise: Mary Ann Mason

(walking with graduate student Lorelei
Mitchell and her baby) has been in a
unique position as dean of the Graduate
Division to study work/life balance issues.
From fireside chats with students to national
speaking engagements, Mason is a tireless
advocate for family-friendly policies.
Another graduate student, Chrysanthi Leon,
who is completing her Ph.D. this year (“in
six years, along with a JD and a daughter
who will be two”) says Mason’s “work on
behalf of women in academia like me has
made Berkeley a wonderful place, and has
been part of my spiel to potential admits to
our graduate program. My ability to finish
was due to student family housing,
University childcare, and the Normative
Time Grant. I wish I had been able to
benefit from paid maternity leave — this is
a truly wonderful accomplishment.”
(Maternity leave for supported women
graduate students was approved by UC in
February.) Adds Leon: “I will push for
similar accommodations for grad students in
my new position as an assistant professor of
sociology at the University of Delaware.”
Peter DaSilva photo

By Lisa Harrington

The Parent Rap

A conversation with
Mary Ann Mason on why babies matter
Mason has been pursuing the answer for some time. A
professor in law and social welfare in the Graduate School of
Social Welfare, she publishes and lectures nationally on child
and family law matters; the history of the American family
and of childhood; and public policy issues related to work and
family, child custody, children’s rights, and stepfamilies.
Among her publications are a major work on work/family
issues, The Equality Trap, and two major works on child
custody, From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights: A History
of Child Custody in America and The Custody Wars: Why
Children are Losing the Legal Battles and What We Can Do
about It.
For the past several years, Mason has been leading a
major study on family formation issues called “Do Babies
Matter?” that has captured the attention of universities around
the world and received wide coverage in the media. Stories
have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Science magazine,
Newsweek, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education,
Academe, Change, and on CNN, to name a few. Marc Goulden,
co-author of the study, has a Ph.D. in social history and a
background in life-course analysis and is a full-time academic
researcher with UC Berkeley. “The press has been very important
to us,” says Mason. “Our UC family-friendly policies have
Early babies, tenure babies, or no babies at all — is there a good time to have a
baby in academe?
“While the question seems so straightforward,” says Mary Ann Mason, dean of
the Graduate
Division, “there is no easy answer.”
gotten a lot of national attention, and other universities have felt
encouraged to follow suit. So it has been enormously important
in spreading the ideas across the country.”
In 2005, the presidents of nine research universities
(Cal Tech, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Yale) issued a joint statement on
gender equity in higher education that said, in part: “Our goal
as research universities is to create conditions in which all
faculty are capable of the highest level of academic achievement.
Continuing to develop academic personnel policies,
institutional resources, and a culture that support family
commitments is therefore essential for maximizing the
productivity of our faculty.”
Last fall, the National Academy of Sciences published a
major report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the
Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering”
(http://newton.nap.edu/catalog/11741.html#orgs) that cited
the Berkeley study and called for an end to gender bias in
academic institutions.
“Institutional change is typically slow, but change is
exactly what is happening,” says Mason. Change that will
improve many work environments. We spoke with her this
spring about her ongoing research.
TheGraduate • 2007 5
Q: Your study “Do Babies Matter?” has been referred to as the gold standard for
research on how children impact an academic career. How did the project begin?
A: When I became dean in 2000, it was the first time that women outnumbered
men among new graduate students at Berkeley. Fifty-one percent of the students
in the entering class were women who had come to pursue doctoral studies or
professional degrees in law, public health, social welfare, and other fields. It was
an historic moment. But having dealt with family issues over the years in my
research on gender equity, I knew that this was good news but not necessarily
the moment of victory for women. So the “Do Babies Matter?” project began as a
way to forecast the effect of family formation on the lifelong careers of these
women, and Marc and I knew exactly which data could be used to do this.
Q: Which was?
A: The Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a longitudinal employment database on
Ph.D. recipients that the National Science Foundation sponsored along with the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institute of Health.
The SDR was an incredibly rich source of data. It followed more than 160,000
Ph.D. recipients from 1973 to 1999 so we could actually pinpoint the exact
effect of family formation. Because it was such powerful data, it allowed us to
show the campus and the UC system, and ultimately the nation, how women
Ph.D.s got stuck in the academic pipeline and where they dropped out —
primarily between getting the Ph.D. and taking the first job. There was a huge
leak out of the pipeline there.
Q: Because of babies?
A: That was the major reason, family formation. Overall, only 55 percent of
women with early babies — babies born any time up to 5 years post-Ph.D. —
became tenured professors. By comparison, 78 percent of men with early babies
got tenure. Women dropped out of the track not because they were denied tenure
— but because of family issues and wanting to have babies, to start their families.
It’s a terrible loss of talent.
Q: What’s been done so far to keep women in the academic pipeline?
A: We’re offering stronger family-friendly initiatives. That’s what we proposed,
which was the beginning of the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, a UC-wide
program for ladder-rank faculty. As a result of the Do Babies Matter? research
and our survey of UC faculty, we received funding from the Sloan Foundation
to implement flexible career policies at UC, expanding the family-friendly
policies that have been in place since 1988. Though UC has been relatively
progressive in this area, the policies, we found, have been underused by faculty.
Q: Did your survey of faculty reveal why?
A: Yes, several reasons. One was that the policies were not well known. There
also was confusion about eligibility. So communication was a problem. Although
UC offered an active-service, modified-duties policy, faculty members
who knew about it were reluctant to take advantage because of departmental
climate and fear of retribution if they requested it. To make these policies more
effective, we needed to shift the culture and restructure the University workplace
so that the policies became entitlements.
Q: How did the UC faculty survey response compare to the SDR data? What
were the major findings?
A: In the first project, we used the SDR data to look at how family formation
affects academic men and women. In the second project, the survey of UC
faculty, we turned the evidence on its head and asked how career affects family
formation — what happens to both men and women who put academic success,
securing an assistant professor job, before parenthood. And here we saw an
even bigger gap between the outcomes of men and women — what we call the
Changing society: Strong interests in equity and
societal issues are what drive Marc Goulden and
Mary Ann Mason, research partners on Do Babies
Matter? — a path-breaking study of academic careers
and family issues. Says Goulden, “I’ve lived the grad
school experience and have seen people come in with
a great sense of purpose and wanting to contribute
and then, for various reasons, get pushed off to the
margins.” They knew the anecdotes, explains
Goulden, but their data on Ph.D.s, faculty, and grad
students now shows the need for family accommodation
policies compellingly. “The struggle to balance
career and family while the tenure clock is ticking
affects people’s dreams,” says Goulden. “Highly
talented men and women who have trained for years
and years look into the future and ask, ‘If I pursue this
path, how can I have a family?’ This can also affect
the health of an institution. Administrators are
beginning to see that the younger generation wants a
better work-family balance. I think one of the reasons
our research has received so much attention is that
these policies are truly low in cost and high in yield.”
Peg Skorpinski photo

“baby gap.” Our survey showed that being

married with children was a formula for success
for men, but the opposite was true for women.
We learned that 70 percent of tenured male
professors, compared to only 44 percent of
tenured female professors, were married with
children. And only one in three women who
postponed motherhood to take a fast-track
university job ever had children.
Q: How did academic women without children
do?
A: Having no babies at all was the dominant
success mode for women. Among tenured
professors, we found a much larger percentage
of single women without children. There was a
higher divorce rate, too, among women faculty
at the top tier. So we saw a dramatic shift in
family demographics — not only do women
with children drop out of the academy, but
those who continue on are far less likely to have
children or to be married. This presents a
double standard in terms of gender and equality.
6 TheGraduate • 2007
Q: What kind of support do academic families need?
A: A flexible part-time option for tenured and tenure-track faculty, better
child-care options, relocation assistance, re-entry postdoctoral fellowships,
and measures to discount resume gaps in hiring faculty. These are some of
the things we’ve proposed.
Q: You recently added graduate students to the mix, in the third part of
the Do Babies Matter? project. What kinds of questions did you ask them
and what was their response?
A: Since graduate students are the first part of the academic pipeline, we
wanted to find out what their attitudes are about balancing their professional
goals with their personal lives at Berkeley. So last fall, we surveyed 4,201
students who were in the second year of their doctoral program or beyond, and
around 50 percent of them responded. Almost 12 percent of the respondents
have children. Their response told us how extremely busy all graduate
students are. We learned that most would not consider starting a family
while pursuing the Ph.D. Women doctoral students, more than men, have
experienced a chilly climate when they have chosen to have children. So
we’re focusing on that and working on ways to encourage them, because
actually it’s probably a good time to have children. There’s more flexibility
and support, in some ways, as a graduate student than when you’re an
assistant professor. Also, graduate students are getting older, on average. By
the time they earn their Ph.D., they’re 34 or 35 years old.
Q: One of the questions you’re asked most often is whether there is an
optimal time to have children. Is there a best time?
A: No, it really depends on one’s circumstances. But what we’re trying to do
is to study the problems and identify the kinds of support needed at every stage
of an academic career so women — and men — will have more options.
Q: Overall, is combining career and family significantly easier for men in
academia?
A: Yes. Across the board, men can have children at any time and still be
considered serious in their research. Women in academia who do the same are
considered less serious, because women have a very significant second shift as
caregivers. In our survey of graduate students, the men with children report
that they are doing a considerable amount of child care too, so it’s not entirely a
women’s issue. What this really means is that graduate student parents need
family-friendly benefits as much as faculty. We have to have support for
families every step of the way.
Q: What kinds of support does Berkeley offer?
A: The campus just approved paid maternity leave, which is a huge step
forward. Beginning next fall, women doctoral students who hold fellowships
or academic appointments as Graduate Student Instructors and
Graduate Student Researchers will be eligible for six weeks of paid leave.
We also provide a graduate student parent policy for “stopping the clock”
— extending academic milestones, preliminary exams, qualifying exams,
normative time.
Q: What about child care?
A: Child care is a major issue as well, and we’ve increased the number of
spaces in campus child care somewhat and would like to do more. Parents
also need ways to connect with each other, so we’ve established a wonderful
online network for faculty and student parents called UC Families.
Campus housing for families has improved, and to help with expenses we
offer a graduate student parent grant. So we are doing quite a lot for graduate
student parents at Berkeley.
Q: In a recent interview, you said, “Encouragement
is 99 percent of the game. Individual
differences between genders are far less important
than social encouragement.” Is your research
having an impact on University culture and
providing more encouragement for women?
A: Yes, I think so. I think one of the ways to
TheGraduate • 2007 7
RESEARCH NOTES
The leading edge: Angelica Stacy (pictured), associate vice
provost for faculty equity, and Mary Ann Mason, dean of the
Graduate Division, were co-principal investigators of the 2003 Sloan
grant of $420,000, which helped support an intense internal review
of UC policies to help faculty
balance caregiving responsibilities
with their careers. The UC
Faculty Family Friendly Edge
became an initative for tenuretrack
faculty at all 10 UC
campuses and its 5 medical
centers. UC policies for faculty
parents now include childbearing
leave, parental leave,
active-service modified duties,
part-time work to accommodate
family responsibilities, stopping
the tenure clock, and personnelreview
procedures. “The policy
changes position UC well for the
approaching hiring boom, as aging faculty prepare to retire in large
numbers and campuses prepare to replace those teachers and expand
the ranks over the next decade,” says Stacy. Last fall UC was one of
five universities (Duke, Lehigh, Florida, and Washington were the
others) selected for the Sloan Foundation ACE Award, which included
$250,000 for each institution to implement flexible family-friendly
policies. “Flexible career paths can meet the needs of an increasing
diverse faculty and advance institutional goals, such as improved
recruitment and retention and maintaining academic competitiveness
in a global market,” says Kathleen Christensen, program director for
Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families at The Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. “The winning institutions demonstrated the ability to
accelerate existing programs, quickly implement creative new approaches
and model best practices in faculty career management.”
Peg Skorpinski photo

encourage women is to share success stories and strategies,

because there are success stories out there too. We need to share
them with all graduate students, but especially women. A major
reason why graduate women change their career goals during
graduate school is the perception that balancing an academic career
with family is impossible. In our latest survey, we see roughly 50
percent of both men and women at the beginning of their doctoral
programs wanting to become professors at research universities. But
as they move further along in their graduate career, the number for
women drops to 31 percent. So in graduate school we’re already
seeing this bifurcation based on family issues, where women are
thinking of dropping out — and do. It’s such a huge waste of trained
minds. We’re losing the best and brightest if we give up on them.
Q: Are larger numbers postponing childbirth until later in their
careers?
A: Well, in our study of UC faculty, this is the case. Most women
in the study had their children between age 38 and 40. They
waited until they got tenure. That seemed to work quite well for
some, but others regretted not being able to have as many children
as they wanted. The risk of the “tenure baby” is that a woman’s
fertility rate drops.
Q: What are reports from Berkeley Ph.D.s now entering the
academic job market?
A: I’ve heard some good stories lately. For instance, one of our
graduate students who had a child during graduate school was
pregnant again when she went on the job market. When you’re
interviewing, there’s always the question of whether to say you’re a
parent or plan to become a parent, but when you’re pregnant it’s hard
to ignore. So she just went in and said she was looking for a university
with family-friendly policies, and the University of Illinois hired
her and gave her the first semester off. So that was a good story.
Q: Then family-accommodation policies will help in recruiting
future faculty.
A: We think they will be extremely important, as the next generation
of scholars, both men and women, seek a healthier work/life
balance. I was having lunch at the Faculty Club recently and sat
next to a young man who had just come to campus as an assistant
professor with his wife — both were hired, he and his wife. And
he said, “We came here because you have family-friendly policies
and we’re thinking of having a baby.” That was so nice to hear. So
it does pay off, the idea that the university becomes more competitive
when graduate students and new faculty can pick a place
that’s better for those kinds of policies. It’s going to have a national
effect and will be extremely important to UC as larger numbers of
faculty retire and we compete with other institutions for the
world’s top scholars.
Q: You’ve written openly about your own journey through
academia in your books on gender and equality. Were you a
graduate student parent?
A: Yes. I had my son Tom at the very end of graduate school, and
back then it was, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I had begun graduate
school back East, but by that time I was living on the West Coast
and was married — I had followed my husband out here and was
part of a dual-career couple. But it was hard to get a job as a new
Ph.D. in history in the ‘70s, so I went to law school. Then I had
to drop out of practicing law after I went through a divorce,
because, as a single mother, I didn’t have a support system. So I
had my difficulties. I was one of the people who really
dropped out of the track, but unlike most I got a second chance
and came back ten years later. It happened because I wrote a
book, The Equality Trap, which got attention. I also remarried
and had another child, my daughter Eve. I tell my story in the
introduction to my new book. My story is part of the reason
that I’m so interested in this work.
Q: You are the first woman to serve as graduate dean at
Berkeley. Why haven’t we seen more women in top administration
positions?
A: There are very few. I was the only woman dean at Berkeley
for several years. Part of the reason that there haven’t been more
women at the top is because there’s a kind of lock-step progression
in academia in which you’re supposed to take on certain
administrative duties at certain times — become department
chair and so on. And many women are raising children and
can’t take on those kinds of service jobs until later, so they
get out of the regular track. One of the ways you can obviate
that is to jump. You take people who are very good and
promising and don’t require them to go up through every stage
to get to the higher level, because they’re ready for it now. They
may not have been able to participate in their 40s, but in their
50s they’re able to do quite a lot.
Q: Does your new book, Mothers on the Fast Track, include
your research on women in academia?
8 TheGraduate • 2007
All in the family: A picture says a thousand
words...in January, cameras flashed as Nancy Pelosi,
66, gently cradled her baby grandson while she
made history as the first woman elected Speaker of
the House of Representatives. When she stepped to
the podium to accept the gavel, she invited all of the
children attending the swearing-in ceremony to join
her there. Surrounded by boys and girls of all ages,
Speaker Pelosi declared, “We have cracked the marble ceiling.” For
our daughters and granddaughters, she said “The sky is the limit.” In
March another historic moment occurred as historian Drew Gilpin
Faust, 59, a mother of two, was selected to lead the country’s oldest
campus. “I would have bet big money that we’d have a female
president of the United States before we had a female president of
Harvard University,” quipped Boston Globe columnist Ellen
Goodman. Yet four out of eight Ivy League schools now have women
in charge (Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Brown). Women who walk
the corridors of power like them no longer hide their family ties. Nor
should they, says Mary Ann Mason (above, right). Co-author of a
new book, Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can
Balance Family and Career (Oxford University Press), she shares her
personal path in academia and the stories of other ambitious women
who began careers in medicine, law, business, and media in the
1970s and ‘80s. Mason wrote the book with her daughter, Eve
Mason Ekman (above, left), who received a Masters in Social
Welfare from Berkeley in 2005. (An aspiring journalist, Ekman
founded Ethsix, an award-winning publication focused on graduate
research in the schools of journalism and social welfare.) Their book,
Mothers on the Fast Track, published this spring is “a roadmap” for
women just beginning their professional careers; mothers wanting to
reenter the job market after a baby-break; and older women seeking
a second chance at a top tier career. “I know that women’s
experiences of the last decades have not dramatically simplified the
choices for the future,” says Mason. “I’ve watched many a class of
excellent women struggle to find their own way…without clear models
for ‘how to’ have a career and family.” The book is a guide for men, as
well, she explains, “Transformative structural changes in the workplace
to accommodate family must work for them as well, or they will fail.
Men must also have the opportunity to become full participants in the
raising of their children.”
Eve Mason Ekman photo

Something to talk about

The following links will take you to news and articles about the
Do Babies Matter? study.
Do Babies Matter? The Effect of family formation on the lifelong
careers of academic men and women (Academe Nov–Dec 2002):
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/deans/mason/Babies%20Matter1.pdf
Do Babies Matter? Closing the Baby Gap (Academe Nov–Dec 2004):
http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/babies%20matterII.pdf
UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge:
http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu
Mary Ann Mason Online:
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/deans/mason/index.shtml
A: It’s based on it, but it’s not exclusively about academia.
We trace the career paths of women lawyers, doctors, and
women in the corporate world, and in media. What we’ve
found is that the patterns are all very much the same.
Women start out toe-to-toe with men, but during the makeor-
break years, between ages 30 and 40, women are faced
with difficult choices—whether to have children at all and, if
so, how to fit it in with their career. For women, the timing
is terrible — their biological clock is on a collision course
with their career. Because of this many women settle for the
second tier. So we also follow what happens to women who,
for family reasons, decide to go into the second tier. In
medicine, the second tier can be pretty comfortable with a part-time
practice, being well-paid, and having good status. In academia, when
women choose to go into the second tier as part-time lecturers — the
gypsy scholars — they’re pretty much labeled and may never get a
tenured faculty position on that track. And until recently in many
places, those positions included very little in benefits or security
and no participatory rights in the university. So that becomes a
very frustrating track.
Q: Is the second tier growing?
A: Yes. The second tier is growing. For example, more than
50 percent of undergraduate college classes are taught by
part-time instructors. In law, women drop out at twice the
rate of men, so only 16 percent are partners even though
women make up a substantial part of law classes. In the
media world, many women freelance — a copy editor, for
instance, may work from home because she has children. So
there’s this huge army of part-timers and freelancers. In the
corporate world, there’s the middle management plateau
where many women stop. Our book focuses on the make-or-break
years — how we can make that period better for families. The
number of hours we work has been ratcheted up, and is especially
difficult for parents with young children, because early childhood
is very intensive.
Q: Would you say the outlook is improving?
A: There are signs that it is. There are other universities like us,
who take it seriously. Administrators acknowledge that the culture
is changing — and pretty quickly. It’s not just a women’s issue.
When we surveyed the UC campuses, the men faculty, in fact the
majority of them, said they wanted a part-time tenure track as
well. So I’m very hopeful we can transform the workplace so that
it’s a more positive place for both women and men.
Q: Your daughter Eve wrote your latest book with you. How have
you talked about these issues with her?
A: Well the best way to talk with Eve was to have her do the
interviews for the book. She heard so many different stories and
saw how the workplace structure has been set up to defeat mothers.
But she believes the next generation, hers, will be more
committed to sharing the child care than mine was. She’s very
confident about that, that her generation can make it happen.
TheGraduate • 2007 9
A major reason why top faculty recruits
decide to accept or turn down job offers
has to do with family responsibilities
and perceptions of where they will be
able to achieve a work/life balance.
To explore these issues further, UC Faculty
were asked to complete a Work and Family
Survey in 2002–2003. More than 4,400
tenure-track faculty responded, providing
critical insights into the struggle academics
face when trying to manage research and
teaching with caregiving responsibilities. In the
survey, in fact, women faculty reported that
they were working over 100 hours per week.
Many respondents argued for a flexible parttime
option. Said one, “I believe that it is
essential that faculty can maintain tenured
track appointments but be allowed to be part
time for periods of their career, especially with
young infants or with problem teenagers or
elderly ill parents/spouses. The present
policies are antiquated.”
The faculty survey and its results are Part II
of Do Babies Matter?, a national study by
Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. The UC
Faculty Family Friendly Edge initiative,
designed to develop and implement a
comprehensive package of innovative workfamily
policies and programs for ladder rank
faculty in the UC system, is an outgrowth of
their pathbreaking research. The UC Faculty
Family Friendly Edge, supported by a
$420,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, is led by Mason and Angelica
Stacy, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty
Equity. Other members of the research group
include Goulden, Carol Hoffman, Manager,
Work/Life, and Karie Frasch, Senior Research
Analyst, all from UC Berkeley.
Since 1988, UC has supported faculty
parents with:
• Active-service modified duties or
ASMD (relief from teaching duties for a
semester or quarter)
• Tenure clock extension for assistant
professors with substantial responsibility for
a newborn or newly placed child under 5
• Paid maternity leave for birth
mothers (typically six weeks)
• Unpaid parental leave (up to one
year)
In its 2005 report, the UC Faculty Family
Friendly Edge team made the following
recommendations to strengthen and improve
existing policies:
• Make clear that ASMD and tenure
clock extension are entitlements.
• Develop and disseminate a faculty
recruitment brochure emphasizing
UC’s family friendly policies, resources,
and benefits.

The UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge

• Provide comprehensive family friendly
policy informational packages for
chairs, deans, and others, and an
informational session during annual
chair orientations.
• Encourage policy use and a UC family
friendly culture through the development of
a UC wide listserv/website for faculty
and others to share their UC work/life
experiences and insights, family friendly
scheduling of meetings and seminars for
faculty, and campus work/family
advisory committees, work/life
managers, and faculty equity
officers.
In 2005, the project produced the UC
Families newsletter and website. A resource
for faculty, staff, and students who are
balancing academic goals or careers with
family life, the newsletter provides a valuable
network. Its subscribers can post questions or
engage in discussions with other UC parents.
Visit the UC Families website (http://parents.
berkeley.edu/ucfamilies) for details.
Last fall, the team received an ACE Award
from the Sloan Foundation that provided
$250,000 for the Berkeley and Davis
campuses to expand programs supporting
career flexibility for tenured and tenure-track
faculty. The award came at a fortuitous time,
just one week after the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) released a report on the
barriers faced by women in academic science
and engineering. Chancellor Robert Birgeneau
and Alice Agogino, professor of mechanical
engineering, were members of the panel that
authored the NAS report.
This spring, UC mounted a systemwide
educational campaign to assure that its faculty
are aware of the policies and that they are
used equitably. “It’s not enough for these
progressive steps to be on the books,” says
Mason. “These policies have to be firmly
embedded into the workplace culture to be
effective.”
In March, an online toolkit called “Creating
a Family Friendly Department,” was launched.
Intended for use by deans and chairs at all of
the UC campuses, the toolkit is a 23-page
downloadable PDF that includes family
accommodation policies and laws, case
examples, faculty quotes, charts and timelines
for family leave, and family-friendly resources
and programs.
Additional UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge
intitiatives include:
• Offer a flexible part-time option for
tenure-track faculty with caregiving
responsibilities
• Provide a relocation counselor for
new faculty recruits and their families, and
to assist with spousal employment issues.
• Increase the availability of high quality
university-sponsored infant and
child care.
• Create a university-sponsore emergency
back-up childcare system.
• Encourage fraculty hiring committees to
discount caregiving resume gaps in
order to assist PhDs in their efforts to return
to academia after a family-related stop-out.
• Provide adoption benefits and
tuition reimbursement for faculty and
their family members; cover a portion of
childcare expenses related to travel through
existing faculty travel grants; and
provide an elder/adult dependent
care counselor at each campus.
To keep up with the latest developments,
visit the project’s website (http://ucfamilyedge.
berkeley.edu), and check back often.
— Lisa Harrington