MotherScholar and MotherLeader: Reflections From a Little Past the Middle

Introduction

Traditionally thought of as a time of career-building (Coate et al., 2015, 2018), for many academics, mid-career is a time of stagnation and potential disenfranchisement. While professors continue to teach and conduct research, it is often without the verve felt earlier in their careers and this sort of slow and steady pace often leads to a professional plateau (Yan, He, Guo, & Wang, 2020). Colleges and universities typically do very little in the way of professional development, mentoring (Curran, Hamilton, Mansfield, Mountz, Walton-Roberts, Werner, & Whitson, 2019) or career engagement at mid-career. The usual line of thinking is that tenured professors can take care of themselves and their own professional engagement and motivation. While this approach is common, what is also clear is that it isn’t working. In their meta-synthesis of four decades of studies, Baker and Manning (2020) concluded that institutions of higher education need to provide more appropriate and career-stage specific support for their mid-career faculty. While organically, any professor who is “in the middle” can offer the same conclusion, it’s reassuring to have data to support that knowledge.

Although it is true that all mid-career faculty need support, for women in higher education, the experience of mid-career can vastly differ from those of their male counterparts. Mid-career for academic women is often a time of settling into one’s profession with a sense of security, taking on management/leadership roles (Maddox-Daines, 2016), and engaging in many types of institutional service. While mid-career academic women clearly engage in scholarship in their discipline, research has shown that they carry the bulk of service work at colleges and universities (Guarino & Borden, 2017). Though important, service work does not garner women the accolades that research accomplishments do (Aiston & Jung, 2015). Additionally, women frequently have caregiving responsibilities at home (sometimes, for both children and parents) (Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2019) that add stress on an already heavy work-life burden. Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2016) found that academic women generally successfully navigate the complexities of work-life balance during mid-career but suggest much that institutions of higher education can do to support them, including updating campus policies, offering mentorship programs (at mid-career), creating professional development opportunities, and overall working to uplift all mid-career academics.

One of the few options for career challenge or change that is available to mid-career academic women is a potential path to leadership in the institution. While not ideal, and not for everyone, often mid-career women serve in a middle management capacity, such as a Department Chair. Far from invigorating or soul-filling, the position of Department Chair often extinguishes the vitality from those who serve in that position. On top of the usual struggles a Department Chair faces, women Chairs frequently navigate a host of other challenges, including establishing a personal, non-masculine, leadership style, having a voice at the table, and overcoming stereotypical perceptions of a female in power (Schnackenberg and Simard, 2017). Add in the previously mentioned stressors of caregiving and motherhood to academic women’s leadership roles, and you have motherscholars, i.e., academic mothers (CohenMiller, 2018, 2020; Matias and Nishi, 2018) who have become MotherLeaders, i.e. motherscholars in leadership positions in the academy (Schnackenberg, 2018, 2020, 2021).