College And University Professors


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College And University Professors

College And University Professors

Robert Drago and Carol Colbeck's The Mapping Project: Exploring the Terrain of U.S. Colleges and Universities for Faculty and Families (2003) tackles "general issues and the specific institutional context involved to examine the junction between family and employment commitments…” Using Joan Williams’s “ideal worker” theory, Drago and Colbeck note how university work-life conditions disempower or subjugate women.

Protecting academic career amidst work-life balancing issues

In their initial report (2001), Drago and Colbeck say that faculty members, especially women, protect their academic career through “discrimination avoidance” because the academe favors those who sacrifice caregiving and household duties for non-personal goals. Furthermore, such "bias avoidance" has two categories (2003):

  • Productive – i.e., behaviors resulting in improved work performance, at the expense of family welfare. For instance, fertility and partnering behaviors, including making decisions to avoid partnering or child rearing, and choices to delay or limit the number of children raised; and
  • Unproductive – i.e., behaviors leading to negligible or damaging effects on actual work performance by hiding or minimizing family commitments to project an ideal worker performance like when parents say they are sick when it is actually their children who are ill.

Drago and Colbeck (2003) substantiate their theory by introducing these three concepts:

  • Bias acceptance: Planning and fulfilling family commitments with corresponding career penalties.
  • Daddy privilege: Men are commended when they attend to family matters while at work. On the other hand, women encounter workplace bias against caregiving.
  • Bias resistance: Efforts to counter discrimination by “either switching time and effort away from work and towards family, making commitments to family explicit in the workplace, or pressing for policy innovations that facilitate dual commitments to work and family.”

Developing humane and gender sensitive work-life policies

Given the adverse impact of paid work and personal life conflicts on employees, including university professors, their ability to cope is influenced not only by their personal attributes and decision to do so, but as well as by institutional and public policy support. A progressive personnel management shuns rigid work policies that force employees to favor the organization and sacrifice resources for their non-work concerns.

Workplaces that insist on traditional human resource (HR) “one size fits all” practices “…generate stress, and detract from the pleasures of parenting and the simple enjoyment of personal life,” as Linda Duxbury and colleagues write in their 1999 study on work-life conflict in Canada. Their HR policies need to re-evaluated and modified to allow men and women employees to cope with balancing paid work and personal life demands. Cognizance and genuine concern to help address these issues not only raise organizational competitiveness and encourage personnel retention, but also inspire employee satisfaction or worker happiness.

Sources:

  • Drago, Robert and Colbeck, Carol. 2003. The Mapping Project: Exploring the Terrain of U.S. Colleges and Universities for Faculty and Families. (accessed May 26, 2006).
  • Duxbury, Linda; Higgins, Chris; and Johnson, Karen. 1999. "An Examination of the Implications and Costs of Work-Life Conflict in Canada." Public Health Agency of Canada. (accessed March 26, 2006).