Single parents in academia face ‘compounded disadvantage’
Academics who are single parents face “unique structural” challenges but risk being “invisible” in universities, according to a new paper.
Few institutions collect specific data on whether their staff have sole responsibility for a child, researchers found, despite the potential for this to have a negative impact on their working lives.
Published in the journal Higher Education Research & Development, the study surveyed 48 university workers in STEM fields at Australian universities about how their experiences of being a solo parent had impacted their career.
Seventy-one per cent of respondents stated that their parenting or caring responsibilities negatively impacted career progression. Many cited the inability to do the same amount of work as colleagues without caregiving duties, with one saying: “I just cannot compete or dedicate the same hours as my peers with older or no children.”
Some 58 per cent of solo parents said this had likely or definitely impacted their career, and 100 per cent responded “definitely not” when asked if they had a work-life balance.
The paper argues that although researchers have often looked at the impact of childbirth on women’s careers in STEM, “studies of these trends do not specifically address the experiences of single parents”, who face “unique structural and institutional barriers within academia”.
The paper adds that a lack of institutional data-gathering on solo parents “demonstrates how existing workforce data and policy categories can render diverse family arrangements institutionally invisible”.
“This lack of granular attention to diverse parental experiences in academia, particularly single- or sole-parents who are disproportionately women, represents a significant gap in the literature.”
One person told the study that the demands of solo parenting made it nearly impossible to meet the expectations of academic success because they were unable to put in extra hours.
Another said: “This is becoming a career only suitable for people who are their household’s second income earner…it treats people badly, makes career progression difficult, and relies on large amounts of unpaid time.”
Many participants reported declining conference attendance, international collaborations, fieldwork, or leadership opportunities because of childcare responsibilities. These challenges are seen as being particularly relevant for academics in STEM fields because of greater expectations of fieldwork compared with other subjects, with the report arguing that STEM “may intensify caregiving inequities found across academia”.
The report says: “For sole parents pursuing STEM careers, the collision between academia’s inflexibilities and the demands of caregiving produces a distinct, compounded disadvantage. While caregiving-related conflict already disproportionately affects women in academia, sole parents must absorb these pressures without the buffering effects of shared care, financial support or temporal flexibility.
“Expectations of long and irregular working hours, travel and uninterrupted productivity are therefore experienced not as negotiable trade-offs but as structural barriers, making it difficult for sole parents to compete on equal footing with colleagues who can redistribute caregiving responsibilities.”
The report says its research is a “first step” in “understanding the dynamics influencing single parents in STEM fields in the higher education sector”, and said that the study could be repeated at a national scale with the aim of achieving a larger sample size, adding that further research should compare single parents’ experience across subjects.
juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com