Tips and perspectives for academic moms.(MOVEABLE TYPE)

Thirty-five years ago, with a PhD in history from Harvard University and a two-year-old child, I took my lack of a tenure-track job as a sign of personal failure. Too bad I was a generation too early to read a new book filled with tips and perspectives.

Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers (Oxford University Press 2007) is an engrossing study by Dr. Mary Ann Mason and her daughter, Eve Mason Ekman. WIHE readers know Mason, who just returned to teaching and research after being graduate dean at UC Berkeley, as co-author of the 2002 study "Do Babies Matter?" with Marc Goulden. Ekman, a medical social worker and journalist, did the interviews for the book and brings a different generational perspective.

Pioneers in Mason's and my generation opened the doors of male-dominated professions to women. Thanks to them, overt discrimination bars fewer women from careers in academics, law, medicine, business and the media. Roughly half the graduates freshly credentialed for careers in these education-intensive fields are women.

Yet women are a much smaller proportion of new hires and few reach the top ranks. Those who do are likely to be single and childless. While direct barriers are lower, the structure of work is unchanged or worse. Getting tenure takes longer working hours and more publications than it did a generation ago. The up-or-out professions are not family friendly.

Young women find some role models in their mothers' generation, but many of us didn't find the answers we'd advise them to follow. A large proportion dropped to a "second tier"--adjunct, part-time or consulting--with more flexibility in exchange for lower pay, less job security and almost no chance to get back onto the fast track. Stepping back meant giving up the potential to reach the level where decisions are made--decisions that could improve life for the next generation of mothers.

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Long ago Mason let a law career slip away to follow a husband's moves, taking it (like so many of us) as a personal failure. During her husband's sabbatical she wrote The Equality Trap (1988), leading to a rare offer of an entry-level faculty position at age 44. From there she rose to graduate dean. Few moms achieve such a second chance.