|
From a health
perspective, the academy and women would seem to be a bad mix. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that academic women experience more health problems
than men. Thinking back to my graduate school days I recall the bizarre
range of illnesses that my female colleagues and I suffered from: strange
rashes, neck and back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, breast infections,
asthma, lupus ... and that's just skimming my memory's surface. Even now,
as a faculty member, I notice that many of the women I work with suffer
from a variety of acute and chronic conditions, ranging from allergies
and chronic colds to cancer. I haven't come across statistical evidence,
but it certainly seems that academic women suffer from more health problems
than men. Why? One reason, perhaps, is stress.
Much has
been written about the obstacles to success that professional women face,
including work-family conflict, stress, and stress-related health problems.
Although not limited to academic careers, a new volume titled Gender,
Work Stress, and Health (referred to from here on as GWSH), edited
by Debra L. Nelson and Ronald J. Burke, sheds some more light on the issue.
What Stresses Do Academic Women Face?
According to GWSH, the literature shows few differences in the ways that
males and females respond to acute stressors. However, women tend to experience
more chronic stressors, like these, which are pervasive in academia.
The Glass
Ceiling
Women are rare in upper levels of academia, as evidenced by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) study of the status of women in science
and several other studies from Johns Hopkins to Berkeley. Women suffer
biases in recruiting, selection, and promotion efforts; they receive fewer
professional development opportunities (e.g., mentoring and networking);
and they face negative bias in evaluations by both students and colleagues.
Workload
and Role Overload
Academic jobs are oversized, created in a time when the academy was
populated with men whose wives nurtured their careers, raised their children,
and managed their homes. Despite the passage of time and the infiltration
of women into the academy, the nature of academic and domestic work hasn't
changed. Regardless of whether they hold a career, women tend to shoulder
a greater proportion of domestic work than do men, and they typically
balance multiple conflicting roles--professional, Mommy, house worker,
etc. When domestic work is coupled to a busy professional life, the workload
is burdensome, and it increases significantly with each child. Academic
careers pose tripartite demands of research, teaching, and service; at
many institutions--perhaps the majority--professors find that campus time
is taken up mostly by the latter two, leaving research and writing for
evenings and weekends---time that women need to keep up their homes and
raise their families. Many (especially younger, untenured) women in the
academy chronically face an awful choice: to do the research they must
do to keep their jobs, or take care of essential domestic obligations.
Maternal
Wall
Academic women often find that their career opportunities are limited
after having children. Colleagues may assume that they have "sold
out" and are no longer committed to their careers--which may influence
tenure, promotion, and other opportunities for advancement (like appointment
to chairs, deanships, and high-profile committees). Even women who attempt
to circumvent the maternal wall by having children during graduate school
often are penalized. Consider my colleague who planned to give birth during
the dissertation-phase of graduate school. Upon informing her advisor
of her pregnancy, he replied, "I'm so sorry," and was unable
to find the time to meet or read her dissertation drafts until well after
she gave birth.
Tokenism
The paucity of women in Research I institutions, and within most university
science departments, leads the few who infiltrate the system to be viewed
by some as tokens. The social psychology literature informs us that tokenism
is associated with exclusion from informal networks, stereotyping, discrimination,
and prejudice. Recent data from MIT, reported in the HHMI Bulletin, suggest
that women scientists experience marginalization and are excluded from
high-level decision-making.
Inappropriate
Behavior and Sexual Harassment
Women in nontraditional fields are especially prone to experiencing a
continuum of harassing behaviors, from behaviors likely to be seen as
harmless by male colleagues, like mild flirtation and sexual jokes, to
more obvious acts like inappropriate touching and repeated requests for
dates or other favors.
Each of these
stressors is linked to increased susceptibility to several kinds of distress,
including burnout, lower levels of perceived well-being, and poor satisfaction
with job and life. While men are more likely to suffer serious chronic
illnesses, such as heart disease and hypertension, as a result of stress,
women tend to suffer from a much wider variety of psychological and physical
complaints. Women report more overall distress than men do and tend to
experience higher levels of psychophysiological symptoms in response to
stress--headaches, insomnia, muscle tension, anxiety, hostility, dizziness,
nausea, pounding heart, lack of motivation, and various acute and chronic
illnesses. Research indicates that parental work stress is associated
with higher levels of parent-child conflict--which suggests that it isn't
just women, but also their children, who are negatively affected by work
stress. Stressors are interactive and cumulative: The more stressors one
experiences, the greater the likelihood of stress-related health problems.
|
