Each week, Symposium Magazine invites an author to guest-blog. This week’s featured piece is Being ‘Different’ in a High-Achieving World by Allison Stevens. She reviewed “Raising Henry,” an account by Columbia professor Rachel Adams on raising a child with Down syndrome.
In her book, Adams explores some of the challenges she encountered as a parent in an academic setting. A number of professors have explored similar themes in other recent books. I’ll spend the rest of the week talking about some of these titles as suggestions for readers who are interested in reading more about this topic.
Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, written by Mary Anne Mason, Nicholas Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden, was released in June by Rutgers University Press. The authors are, respectively, professors of law, sociology, and data initiatives, and they analyzed data collected over a decade on men and women in academia at every stage of their careers. This included the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nation-wide survey of PhDs in the U.S., as well as surveys of the University of California system (where Mason and Goulden teach, both at Berkeley). The book explores “the family sacrifices women often have to make to get ahead in academia and consider how gender and family interact to affect promotion to full professor, salaries, and retirement.”
Also this year, Columbia University Press released Mothers in Academia, an anthology of testimonials by women who are mothers at various points in academic careers—from undergraduates to professors. It details the cultural changes that have “transformed women’s academic lives and, by extension, their families” in an effort to push for reform. The book’s editors are Mari Castañeda, an associate professor at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Kirsten Isgro, an assistant professor of communication studies at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.
Each week, Symposium Magazine invites an author to guest-blog. This week’s featured piece is Being ‘Different’ in a High-Achieving World by Allison Stevens. She reviewed “Raising Henry,” an account by Columbia professor Rachel Adams on raising a child with Down syndrome.
In her book, Adams explores some of the challenges she encountered as a parent in an academic setting. A number of professors have explored similar themes in other recent books. I’ll spend the rest of the week talking about some of these titles as suggestions for readers who are interested in reading more about this topic.
Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, written by Mary Anne Mason, Nicholas Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden, was released in June by Rutgers University Press. The authors are, respectively, professors of law, sociology, and data initiatives, and they analyzed data collected over a decade on men and women in academia at every stage of their careers. This included the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nation-wide survey of PhDs in the U.S., as well as surveys of the University of California system (where Mason and Goulden teach, both at Berkeley). The book explores “the family sacrifices women often have to make to get ahead in academia and consider how gender and family interact to affect promotion to full professor, salaries, and retirement.”
Also this year, Columbia University Press released Mothers in Academia, an anthology of testimonials by women who are mothers at various points in academic careers—from undergraduates to professors. It details the cultural changes that have “transformed women’s academic lives and, by extension, their families” in an effort to push for reform. The book’s editors are Mari Castañeda, an associate professor at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Kirsten Isgro, an assistant professor of communication studies at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.