Schedule creep, stigma push women out of the academy.(Joan C. Williams's 'Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It')

"Glass ceiling" and "chilly climate" are no longer the best metaphors for key barriers that repel highly educated women from university careers. The terms stigma and schedule creep target the problem more clearly, Dr. Joan C. Williams said in her banquet keynote at the Iowa State University ADVANCE conference in October.

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She's a distinguished professor in the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, director of the university's Center for WorkLife Law and a leading authority on employment discrimination against family caregivers. Her book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press 2000) won that year's Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

Who cares about the caregiver?

Family caregivers are women or men who carry significant responsibility for the care of another family member such as a child, a parent or an ailing partner. Most are women. Two underlying issues remain far from resolved:

* Ideal worker norms. In some respects, what universities expect from a professor hasn't changed much in half a century. Back in the 1950s he was a married man whose wife took care of home and children. He was able to give full attention to his work, coming home in time for the dinner his wife set before him. He relocated for jobs and the family trailed alone. When he left town for a conference, his wife kept the home fires burning.

Times have changed but norms have not. Ideal workers enter a career in their 20s and pursue it without a break for the next 40 years, traveling and moving at will. That's unrealistic for many women with families and for men who want significant family involvement.