Women in the Academy

BALANCING CAREER AND FAMILY

Yvonne Tabin - My name is Yvonne Tabin. I am with the Centre for Distance Education here at SFU and I am the Rapporteur for this session which is called Balancing Family and Career. We have myself and four others on the panel this morning. To my left is Janis Rutherford. She has worked at SFU for 30 years, as a secretary and an events programmer in Contemporary Arts, and as a desktop publisher in Student Services. She started her undergraduate degree in 1977 and finished it in 2000. She is currently working on her Master's degree in English and plans to graduate in 2005. She has always been involved in union work on campus, she sits on the executive of the SFU Local of CUPE, a national union that recognizes women's concerns. Both her sons attended SFU daycare from the time they were six months old to their pre-teens. To her left is Malgorzata Dubiel. Malgorzata is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University. She was born and educated in Poland, where she attended the University of Warsaw and there completed her Ph.D in Mathematics. She joined us in 1985, and became interested in mathematics education, and the issues of women and mathematics. She is the President of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group and past chair of the Women in Mathematics Committee of the Canadian Mathematical Society. During her term as the chair of that committee, she organized, in June 2003, a conference Connecting Women in Mathematics Across Canada , for women graduate students in the mathematical sciences. She is also the president-elect of the Simon Fraser University Faculty Association. To her left is Heesoon Bai. Heesoon Bai is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She teaches in Philosophy of Education, and her research interests are in ethics, epistemology, ecology, and Asian philosophies. She has published widely in academic journals and edited volumes on topics ranging from environmental education to zen aesthetics, from social responsibility to democratic moral agency. Her current research (funded by a 3-year SSHRC Grant) focuses on moral perception and attention. She is a recipient of Roger Hamill's environmental educator's award for her contribution to the field by centralizing ecology in ethics and moral education, and more recently, as I am sure many of you know, she is a recipient of the Simon Fraser University Excellence in Teaching Award. And to her left is Shelia Davidson. Sheila has eighteen years experience in middle and senior management in the delivery of child care and family services and twelve years experience as a direct child care provider. She has taught and coordinated an early childhood education program. Since 1991 Sheila has been the executive director of SFU Childcare Society, a non-profit child care agency of eleven programs providing care to children aged 3 months to 12 years at Simon Fraser University. She sits on the Child Care Advocacy Forum and nationally at the Child Sector Council. And I just learned yesterday that she is leaving us to join the city of Vancouver. We will miss her presence here on campus but we know that great things are in store for her. We will start this morning with Janice.

Janis Rutherford - Balancing Career and Family..but where is the rest? When I first heard this topic I took a really personal perspective on it and kind of an instant rejection of the very concept that you are defined by your work or your career, if you wish. For me, this harkens back to one of the many waves of feminism: I've kind of lost track of those waves. In the seventies, women were fighting against being defined solely by their sexuality and you were either a virginal saint, mother or a whore. I wonder have we really made any gains by being defined by our work rather than by our reproductive capabilities? Are we really just producing again, as we once were defined by our production of children? But perhaps not if you consider the inferior position of women working in the academy and we have heard a lot from speakers today about that issue. Women in the academy and their contributions are still not receiving, and I use the term deliberately, the respect that we know it deserves. Of course as a union worker I use the work respect a lot. Acknowledgement, financial and material gains, are all very important but the term respect is very important to me. Now about those roles, now that we are being defined by work, I say reject the roles entirely. Just reject them. You are not just a part of your family or part of an institution at your workplace; you are a person all by yourself. However, I am not going to make a case for cultivating selfishness. I just wanted to make that clear, although I liked Ayn Rand's version of selfishness, right wing as it was.

I am going to make a case for making waves and again we have heard from a lot of speakers today about making waves. The only way that you can make waves is by joining together with other groups in the academy and I am a union person and have been for decades. I helped with the first AUCE contract at SFU, when it was very much a feminist initiative, and the very first contract we negotiated had maternity leave in it. I understand the faculty's problem of not having maternity leave..this was a given for a feminist group of women fighting for our first contract, that there be maternity leave. The Chair of the University negotiating team was Chuck Buchanan, a retired army person with a brush cut, and he called us all girls and we fought continually throughout those meetings to be referred to by something other than girls. He conceded "ladies" thank God. You know, people got so tense in those negotiations that we gave each other neck rubs so that we wouldn't punch him. We got an excellent first contract, all because these men underestimated us, a bunch of women. We had maternity leave before anyone had it federally or nationally. I am very proud of that. That is my union side, but as a person in the academy this has always been my position to the balancing of family and career.

What about the rest of it, what about the rest of me, me as an artist, athlete, intellectual? I am not just a worker, mother, sister or other roles in relation to the people around me. We are all in an institution that purports to educate critical thinkers and productive members of society, and how are you that if you just define yourself by a couple of roles and you don't consider the entire person? We have heard a lot from speakers about the divisiveness of assigning people roles, and if you consider yourself as just an academic and you keep your family life separate from the academy, then you are divided and isolated. If you insist on being a complete person and having access to maternity leave, you might be told that intellectuals aren't supposed to reproduce. I don't know what that is all about. Women are not productive members of the workforce because they reproduce, because they go off and have children. However, you might want to point out to people of this generation that our doing just that is going to support everybody else in Canada in their old age. That is very important. While continually considering the rest of you, not just as a worker, you also have to consider yourself as a member of your community. I thought these images of women within their various communities were relevant, however my impulse was to put a little strike sign in the hands of these marchers.

One thing that I have found to be the case, being in the academy as a Master's student and knowing an awful lot of faculty members as well, is the hierarchy of women within the academy. It's not just within the union, it's not just within a faculty. The majority of women in the academy are down on the bottom of the pyramid. However, in the union the top of the pyramid is men because, of course, their technical skills must be better since they are better at math and everything else requiring thinking skills. Women are obviously far better at filing and organizing people. What I have found is that union workers in the academy are at the very bottom of the pyramid, once again. The attitude that they can be either dispensed with or that they are not as worthy of respect is, I think, very common. During our job action this past spring I was fielding emails from people, both students and faculty. Many were very supportive, which was wonderful, but I remember specifically one email from a student which said that "you don't deserve a raise, you are probably getting overpaid anyway, and you don't have the skills and education to be working in a university." After thirty years of work experience and my degree, I thought I was worth a great deal...well there you go...that's the perception. That would be something that I would fight against in balancing work and career. If I defined myself merely by my job within the academy, I would not have a lot of self-respect. If I saw myself as not having that perfect nuclear family and not making a lot of money, or excelling in a career, I would not feel worthy of respect. However, if I consider the fact that after thirty years working here I am a very well-rounded individual, intellectually, spiritually, then I take the respect that is due to me. The only way I can do that is by joining groups of other people on campus. I have applied for a management position, what a traitor! I will be making waves in APSA as well as in CUPE but again I would like to warn people against justifying themselves by roles and thinking that they have to work to the pinnacle of something just within that one role. There is so much more to a person than their roles. Thank you.

Malgorzata Dubiel - I'm from the Department of Mathematics. My department may very well be the worst in the whole university with respect to gender balance. The Statistics Department has a better gender balance that we do. The Faculty of Science is not very good in this respect, but at least the statistics here shows that things are changing.

When I first came here in '85, there was one woman faculty member and three women lab instructors/lecturers in Mathematics and Statistics. Today, there is one woman faculty member (a different one) and two women lecturers in the Department of Mathematics. There have been some changes in between: there were women hired, and some left, and when the Statisticians left with 1/3 of the overall faculty to become a separate department, 2/3 of female faculty went there. So I still feel that the attitude is that everything is ok if there is one (laugher).

This is a cartoon from American Women in Science newsletter, which I got from my former colleague, Kathy Heinrich (cartoon of woman in a suit flashing her breasts and a shocked man saying "my God - it's a woman!). This cartoon is from early nineties. As Mary Lynn Stewart said, things did change - things are much more subtle now. I know - I have been on search committees both for administrators and for faculty members. There are all kinds of excuses why SFU cannot attract good women and why UBC can attract lots of them. They have really quite a few women mathematicians. Other universities can do better, too. Ours is probably the worst Mathematics department across the country. It is true though that it is due in part to the fact that some universities have departments of Mathematics and Statistics, and Statistics appears to be a much more feminine domain that Mathematics is. But we still have a lot to do.

Part of the problem is probably the issue of balance. The title of this panel is balancing career and work, and in an ideal world we could define balance on our own terms; we could decide for ourselves what it means to balance different parts of our life, what we expect, what are our goals.

What is the situation now? A wishing well, I wish for equality, justice and opportunity. (Cartoon of a woman at a wishing well. After she makes her wish, she turns into a man.) Now, of course, what we have to think is what we can do to change this, because, well, is this the only solution?

There were some answers given already, and I would like to repeat them. We should ask questions, "we" meaning young women entering the profession. One reason why women have difficulties of finding balance on their own terms is that they often don't know enough about the situation in the department, about the resources, about support structures, about what is possible and what's available. When I first came here, from a totally different university system, I had no idea what to expect. And so, asking questions is the only way to learn. Yes, that's true that men are coming better equipped for academic life. They usually know more than women when starting because of all the networking and, you know, coming to ball games and going for a beer in pub, and so on. So - asking questions. If you are not told something, it does not mean that you are not expected to ask. But whom to ask? Sometimes it is difficult to ask colleagues in the department. Sometimes there is a reluctance to ask questions in fear that your colleagues will think that you cannot cope. You don't want to make the impression that you are weak. It is easier to ask outside your department because then nobody in your department has to know. Of course asking other women is best, but you may not know who they are when you first come. It may be difficult to find those women, to know how to reach them. In such cases Faculty Associations are often best places for finding answers to your questions.

I came here to tell you what Faculty Association is doing here. Joan Sharp, who is the president, was not able to come today because she is at a meeting of CAUT in Ottawa. I talked to her about what SFUFA is doing regarding "Family Friendly" policies.

For many years, the focus of our efforts was on trying to recruit more women faculty, look into salary equity, discrimination, and so on. Things are changing though. As we've heard already, there is a brain drain to the South because of higher salaries. But I was very surprised to learn while talking to Joan that, South of the border the AAUP, American Association of University Professors, is deeply involved in the issue "Family Friendly" policies. At the same time, here in Canada, CAUT, Canadian Associations of University Teachers, is not really interested in these issues. So this is something which I am definitely going to ask questions about when I go to their meetings.

What are we doing here, at SFU? Listed here on the transparency are two new SFUFA initiatives which we are just starting. They were initiated by Joan Sharp, together with Dr. Iris Geva May from the Faculty of Education. I met with Joan and Iris, and the student working on the first project. There will be two students hired to work on those projects. The first project will be a survey of family friendly policies at other academic institutions, what is happening at universities, and how we compare.

The second project will be the survey of needs here at SFU. We want to know what is important to you. And here is a question to all of you, a request for help. Of course, first of all we need to get ethics approval for the project. But, before sending the survey to the whole faculty, we'd like to target individual people who can say what their needs are, what they see as missing here at SFU. So, if you know somebody that would like to participate in the first part of the survey, in designing the questionnaire, then please contact the Faculty Association.

Those two projects will be combined into making recommendations of family friendly policies at SFU, which will be sent to the membership and hopefully something will come out of it. You can read more about it on our website: www.sfufa.ca/family.html

Overhead

Heesoon Bai - Thank you for inviting me. However, had I paid attention to the title of this session, Balancing family and career, I might have declined the invitation! I just don't feel like I've balanced them. I feel like I'm completely out of balance. By my own admission, then, I don't qualify to be here!

Jane Roland Martin, who is an educational philosopher, states this from her book, "Reclaiming Conversations": "Discussions about marriage, home, family are missing as our discussions about society's reproductive processes, a category I define broadly to include, not simply conception and birth but the rearing of children, to more or less, maturity and associated activities such as tending the sick, taking care of family needs and running a household". Martin's distinction between the two categories and her observations about our society's devaluation of the category of reproductive processes totally apply to my experience. I got the idea of using Martin's distinction for this short presentation here when I was talking to Cher about my bio that she was requesting for the purpose of introducing the panel presenters. The bio I gave to her and was read out by Yvonne just now is my bio in the category of productive processes. It is my professional, public bio. But here is my other bio from the category of reproductive processes.

I was on tenure track, but I say it was more like a tenuous track: tenuous about survival in the academy. Three years prior to my SFU appointment on tenure track I became a single mom with two children, nine and five at that time. The year I became appointed I assumed the sole, at-home care of my barely ambulating, octogenarian mother with Alzheimer's. Her condition declined steadily over the next few years to the point where she required twenty-four hour vigilant care. Often I got no more than two to three hours of sleep at a stretch and no more than six or less hours of sleep in total. Finally, about four years ago, a point was reached when I felt that I just could not go on with my teaching duties, let alone research and publication. Fortunately, however, my mother qualified for the government assisted home care support program under Burnaby Continuing Health, and we began to receive home care support for six hours a day for five days a week. Without this support, I could not have continued to work! In the meantime, my reputation as a caring and competent teacher grew, which brought an inordinate number of graduate students to study under me and to work with me. Ever since, the volume of thesis supervision and other related academic activities I took on has overwhelmed me. As my time for tenure application approached, I was becoming rather nervous: little time to do research, write and publish. However, I was able to apply for and received an extension on tenure application. As well, my daughters were growing up and began to contribute more to household duties and the care for my mother. I also stepped down from the program coordinator's position for one of the Master programs that I had been serving for five years. I assumed this coordinator's responsibility in the second year of my appointment. You may ask how on earth I ended up in that time-consuming heavy responsibility role as a starting out junior faculty who needed to focus on her own research and publication. I did not know any better; and no one around me in the academy thought to protect me! At any rate, after stepping down from this position, I sprinted the last stretch of the tenure marathon and managed to publish enough journal and book articles to qualify, unreservedly, for my tenure.

Now, I expected total elation and relaxation once I received my tenure, and especially once I began my study leave in the fall. Thus I was completely surprised and dismayed to find myself plunged into states of what appeared to be depression. I was filled with grief about the previous ten years lost in intense and solitary toils, and I was too exhausted to dream about a different and better life to come. And besides, it was not as though my material circumstance changed after getting the tenure. The same precarious juggling of work, parenting and nursing continued. I continued to supervise a large number of graduate students, carry on with assorted academic tasks and commitments, and of course, taking care of my teenaged daughters and my mother was intense as ever. As many profess, nowadays, it is quite challenging to raise teenagers in this culture, and I am not from this culture.

But the care for my mom became more and more tricky as her condition declined steadily and reached the point of her being barely alive. It was becoming nearly impossible to take care of my mother at home. She was extremely frail and prone to all kinds of breakdowns and infections. I despaired, but fortunately another help came our way. This time, we were able to enroll my mother in a part-time resident program at an intensive care facility. For three days a week, she was taken care of away from home, but, alas, into the sixth month of shuffling mom back and forth between home and the care facility, we lost her. She passed away in late February. Losing her was like losing an anchor--an organizing principle for the family. Our family revolved around her care, and her death meant we lost our organizing principle. The structure of our life changed, which means we have to live differently. I have to redefine myself, re-organize and reprioritize my life. But before I can move on to do that, I have to deal with the past pains and losses. There is a lot of grief that is still surfacing up. My children themselves speak of their lost childhood. They had to grow up in the shadow of my struggle, and they too are grieving. All these changes seem like an adventure but some days I see it as an adventure, but some other days, I see it as a plain trauma.

My wish for a more enlightened academic institution is that it sets up infrastructures that take seriously and support what Jane Roland Martin calls the reproductive processes of life. We have to relocate time and resources to foster academic friendship and mentorship as well as giving material support in the form of grants and services to help the overwhelmed and struggling academics to do their expected work.

Sheila Davidson - I am really happy to be here. I am really enjoying the discussion so I am sorry that a) I wasn't here this morning and b) that I won't be able to stay past 12:30. I think that childcare fits in really well with what so many of you are talking about because childcare is obviously is a real support system to women and families. However, what I am going to speak to you today about is more about political nature regarding the needs of childcare in terms of being that support, i.e. affordability, accessibility and quality. Now SFU childcare is well-known for its quality and in a discussion with a member of the current provincial legislature a couple of years ago, when she toured our facility, and said that she really wanted to her to get a unborn child to be in our facility. I responded to her that every family deserves an SFU child. She told me at that time that I was a very persuasive individual and when the Liberals came into power, childcare in this province has been completely decimated. So my comment will be political.

The current reality of Canadian families. I am not going to walk through it (her overheads) because time is of the essence, but I think that gives you an indication of where we're at. 83% of marrying and then 82% of female lone parents are in the workplace. Okay, Canada has gone though having the lowest proportion of working women in the industrialized world to the highest and yet only 12% of those working women's children are in licensed facilities. Licensed facilities where you've got trained, qualified, regulated staff - so where are the other 88%? I want to give you some fees in the City of Burnaby, these are averages. Infants and toddlers, SFU has one infant programs and four toddler programs, infants, babies, toddlers, under threes. So between 800 and 930 dollars a month. We have well over 150 people on our infant and toddler waitlist, especially infants. We cannot give spaces to all these people who need or want our care. Fees in Vancouver are going up to $1011 a month for infants. Childcare is becoming more expensive in post-secondary education. The first five years of life are absolutely critical to brain cell development, brain stem development, social, emotional development and yet as a society we are totally ignoring this really critical time in a child's life. What we give our children in those first five years sets the stage for the rest of their life. I've got five policies of the provincial government. In April 2002 the provincial government changed eligibility levels for low income, subsidy parents. That affected student parents and we lost almost every single one of our subsidy student families. They could no longer afford our care. In B.C. ten thousand families were affected by the change in subsidies. You'll hear the provincial government say that they have increased eligibility by $100 a month, they decreased it by $285 and put it back up by 100. It's a really important thing for you to know. They also changed the subsidy for families needing preschool or social criteria and those are families in low socioeconomic areas like the downtown eastside.

Policy affect #2: We had a program called Childcare B.C. that program was developed by the previous provincial government. What it did was working towards a $14 a day childcare program for anybody who needed or wanted it. One of the very first acts of the provincial government did in August 2001 was cancel Childcare B.C. We in BC were the second jurisdiction to have access to universality. Now Quebec is the only one.

Policy affect #3: which affected the childcare staff of SFU Childcare. The Munro agreement was a collective agreement that was signed in 1999 and affected about twelve to fifteen thousand community social service workers within the province. SFU Childcare staff are members of BCGEU and were affected by that. In April 2003, SFU Childcare lost $480,000 in provincial government funding which directly affected the wages and benefits of the childcare staff and some of them lost $3 an hour plus their access to RRSP and long-term disabilities. Childcare staff in SFU, as in most licensed facilities in B.C. has one to three years post-secondary education. Our staff have 2 -3 years post-secondary. Recruitment and retention is becoming quite an issue in Canada for quality childcare providers. We don't have that at SFU and that is because SFU does have an outstanding facility. We are not typical of childcare.

Policy affect #4: called The New Childcare Operating Grant. Three existing operating grants were rolled into one but the grant is based solely on enrollment. So, for a facility like SFU, because we are fully-enrolled, we get the maximum grants allowable. We don't have very many subsidy parents. For programs in lower socio-economics where they lost a great deal of their subsidy families and subsequently their enrollment levels were low, they'd get the lowest possible grant. Centres are closing. What the Minister responsible for childcare was encouraged to do was to tie those grants to wages and benefits and affordability for families. She refused and ties them to (inaudible).

The fifth is not on the government's legislative act but the advocates are calling it ABC (anything but childcare). What the provincial Liberals have done is created an artificial split between early childhood development and childcare. In early childhood development you have people who have exactly the same post-secondary education as childhood providers but they are being called different things. There is federal dollars flowing into the provinces to use for early childhood development, early learning in care. There is different languages for it. I want you to listen really carefully to what I am going to say because it is a little confusing. What the liberals are doing is they are developing small, early childhood development programs. If you've got, at the dollars coming into B.C. from the federal government, of those dollars 33% of them are being used to develop new ECD programs. There is another 48% of dollars going into those programs which are really cuts to childcare. They have cut childcare. They have taken the new money and it's 33% of the new program. The cuts to childcare are 48. The remaining money was existing dollars. Policies relating to children with special needs are being refocused away from childcare and then, as I said, funding is being diverted.

That's all I am going to show you in terms of the overheads. I would like you to look at that brochure that I gave you. The Common Vision and Agenda for Childcare. The Childcare Advocacy Forum is a group of six provincial childcare organizations who have worked together since March 1999 and have developed this common vision and agenda which lists in there what our goals are in terms of a publicly funded, accessible, affordable, quality system for parents in the province with fair remuneration for childcare staff. This actual goal hasn't changed in about twenty-five years and this year, this November in Winnipeg there is going to be a third national childcare convention. The last one was in 1982 where the buttons that were handed out at the time said "let the army hold bake sales". I hate to say it but nothing's changed. Thank you very much.

Yvonne Tabin - As I mentioned earlier when I was making the introductions, my name is Yvonne Tabin and I am with the Centre for Distance Education here at SFU. I am a program director which means that I work on the course and program development and supervision for the Centre and I am also the Centre's Associate Director.

When I started thinking about today's presentation, I was like Heesoon and I thought, "Oh no, balance, I don't have that at all!" As I continued to think about it, I thought, "Well, for me, balance doesn't really work as a metaphor" [shows image of teeter-totter with a person suspended on each end]. I don't think it is attainable, and I don't think it's desirable, and I will explain.

It doesn't work for me because the first thing that I imagine when I thought about balance was this (like Janis, unfortunately I could not find a graphic with a whole bunch of people on this end) [points to image]: the reason it doesn't work for me is that when you are perfectly balanced, nobody's feet are on the ground. Nobody's planted solidly on the ground, and, at the same time, nobody is on cloud nine. You are just suspended and nobody's where they want to be necessarily and nobody's getting what they want or need. That's one.

The other one is this: at some point over the past couple of years when I was having a particularly busy and hard time--week, week, month or year!--Joan Collinge, who is our Centre's Director, brought this in to me [shows another image]. I don't know if you can see it very well, but it is a male gymnast balanced on his hands horizontally, the female gymnast balanced on top of him facing the opposite direction, balancing on him, holding on to him around the chest. What's written underneath is "Simply the right balance." Now, Joan's spirit was generous. She was trying to convey to me that we need to balance, that is, we need to pay attention to who we are spiritually and physically and emotionally and to our family and all the other needs in our lives. But I looked at this and thought "Oh, my God. It is absolutely impossible. How can anyone do that?" To be that strong, to be that well trained and physically tuned to be able to do that.

Because I have continued to think about what kind of metaphor--what kind or word, verb, adjective would work for me in describing what we try to do as we balance our families, our careers and all the other aspects of our lives--what I'd like you to do over the course of the rest of the session or later on during the day, is to answer the question "What is balancing family and work like? Fill it in, whatever works for you. If the balance metaphor works for you but there is some other way of showing it graphically that you prefer, that's fine. If you have something else in mind that would be great.

My trying to seek the balance over the past couple of years has been kind of a "desperately-seeking movie": desperately seeking a career, academics, and a family, all of it all at once. The progression for me started in 1982 when I began to work full-time as an elementary school teacher. Then I had a series of "Hey, this would be a good idea" moments and one was having a baby and starting a graduate degree at the same time. This would be a good time to do that, while working part-time at the same time. I finished that degree and had another of those "Hey, this would be a good idea" moments: Hey, this would be a good time to do a PhD. and have another baby/1 So both of those two started at the same time. And another one, when, you know, they were kind of all in school, "Hey this would be a good time to start working full-time" and then realizing, after a year or two, "Hey this is hell!" And over the course of the last few years, trying to get it right, trying to fit the work, the family and all those other pieces together. I am currently doing what I call kind of a flexible schedule. I come in really early on four days a week and leave so that I can be with my kids in the afternoon. I am there for a long day on Friday. I realize that I am fortunate in that I work in a group and with a supervisor where that kind of flexibility is possible. I know that that kind of flexibility is more or less available to women across the SFU campus depending upon where they work. That is a concern for me.

What I have learned over the course of these years is that it is important to determine--at least this has been my voyage--what I want and what I need and to recognize the difference between the two, if there are differences, and to make decisions accordingly. Because I have found that I haven't been able to have it all--at least all at once, all together at the same time. Barbara Moses, who is a career management consultant, says that we can have it all but in "chapters" and I would tend to agree--or at least in smaller increments. The problem is, at least for me and for many of us, that we often want to have it all, all at once. Identifying our needs and wants, though, I have learned, is only the first step because ultimately we have to be able to come to terms with them and the decisions that we make. Otherwise we'll continue to be dissatisfied or unhappy. (tape ends)

What I have realized as I live my life trying to combine work and family in ways that work for me and in ways that work for my family (and I'm lucky in that I have a partner who is also doing the same) is that what I have been doing is calibrating, not balancing but calibrating. Continually making adjustments based on the situation and factors at the time: how old my children are; what kinds of activities are they involved in; how responsible they're becoming; how much they, like Heesoon's children, can contribute to the work of the household; the amount of time that I've been working out of the home (I worked part-time while I was doing my graduate studies, so certain things were in better shape then than they are now--the laundry piles up and the dishes pile up); my partner's schedule and the demands on his time; my parents and the extent to which they have needed me. I have a mother with Alzheimer's, who is now in a care facility and that was a struggle for a long time. A lot of my time was needed to support her and my father. His health is now declining and he is becoming more fragile so time is needed there as well. Also, all the other kinds of things that Janis referred to, all the other roles we fulfill and all the other kinds of things we are involved in as people--social, recreational, and health and fitness.

What we are doing is calibrating. As I thought about this calibration an image came to mind and, for me, what works is maternity pants. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the maternity pants, but they used to have just elastic and a big panel that would stretch. Now there are little slots on the side of waistband with elastic that pulls out and along the tab there are six or eight buttons, so as you get bigger you just keep adjusting the pants, moving up from button to button. After you have the baby you move back to probably about four right away and then move back a bit more gradually, gradually, and gradually until you can go back into your other pants. The reason that works for me is because you can make room for lots and lots of stuff and lots of things in these maternity pants when you need to, but you can also adjust them so you can give up stuff, add stuff, carry more around at some times than at other times. You can be really sleek at times and also be prepared when you are not so sleek. Those kinds of calibrations happen in small ways all along and in big ways as well. Some of my bigger calibrations have been choosing not to become an elementary school principal because I wasn't ready and my children, I felt, weren't ready. That's when I went onto my graduate degree. At the end of that I, unlike Heesoon, chose not to pursue an academic career at that time. I wasn't prepared to drive hours, even to UBC, or to take my family elsewhere. They are grounded in our community and my husband has his work there as well. I became involved in other work through Distance Education, which I love, and really enjoy doing. Now, I am at a point where my employment group is set up in such a way that there is a promotion system, much like professors. So C, D and E like assistant, associate, and full professor. I am at the associate level because I worked hard to get there, but I am not prepared to do what else I need to do to move ahead further at this point. I would have to put in lots of time--beyond the hours I spend at the office--preparing papers and doing research and I'm not prepared to do that right now. Maybe that's one of the calibrations I'll make when my children are older and out of high school. So, these are the big ones but we always make little ones all the way along.

Sometimes I feel uncomfortable because I think it could be perceived that I have given up something, but I don't see this as a zero sum game and, for me, it never has been a zero sum game because when I've been making decisions I have always wanted more what I am choosing or, have realized, over the course of having chosen, that I am in a better place than I would have been had I not done that. I've always chosen actively and, in so doing, have always been where I've wanted and needed to be. That's been the interesting thing for me, that in calibrating, our needs and wants often do and can coincide and it is wonderful when they do. For me, they have done and maybe at the end that's what balance is about. Thank you.

Are there any questions or comments? I hope that you're busily writing away if you are thinking of an answer to balancing families and careers and all the other things we do in our lives.

Veronica Dahl - I've got a comment, if I may, what various addresses suggest to me in my experience of many years, I'll start with a small anecdote. I took my baby to Victoria to a conference once and incurred $17 of babysitting expenses while I gave my talk because my husband was there and wanted to attend the talk. Well, in two years they couldn't reimburse those $17 to me, which wasn't, of course, a big deal for the money but I realized it was a big issue for the women that would come after me. I fought a two year battle, without the support of my own department, which I asked and was refused, because I was being told that this was an individual expense. I asked "why is it more individual than the bed I sleep which you paid for twice because I have to go somewhere else?" I am nursing this baby. Well, there was no way of making SFU change the policy, and in fact, it never did. But I went all the way to NSERC which was the funding mechanism and I got them to change the policy for all the women in the country (applause) Thank you. People didn't know at the beginning and I started telling all the women and everybody now who gets a no from SFU goes to the supervisor with "well, NSERC allows it" and there is, of course, the no. They can't say anything.

I think the moral about this and other stories I've been hearing is, they're is so in common with mine - I also have an Alzheimer's mum who lived with me for seven years before moving to Argentina where we are from, to a care facility there and it was hell; I was also a single mother for the last ten years; it has been really difficult to keep it all in balance and I, of course, haven't. I think the main thing we have to get from all this and, from the childcare experiences and all that, is there are all these little things we're fighting for - more childcare, $17 reimbursement etc, etc. Until we fight the final battle which is society has to consider childcare a societal responsibility not an individual responsibility of every woman. As was said here. the next arrangement is going to support us. In Canada we have the additional argument that we are an under populated country. We need immigrants because we cannot really have enough people here and it's going to be a big problem. This is the big problem that prompted France, whose women were refusing to have children and who was decreasing population enormously to develop and implement a maternity protection legislation. This is the minimum we have to struggle for. We have to fight the little battles too because they are in our way, but we'll never be equal until we have fought and won the battle that society has to consider, child-rearing and family responsibilities of mothers, fathers, children, as a societal responsibility not an individual one. I want to say what was done in France because it is really wonderful. I had the question when I was little for my parents "why do women not get pensioned?" and they went yes they do, and I said "well, not the ones that have jobs in the home". That's exactly what France has done now. They give pensions to women for being home carers. They give allowances for each child that's born. They have childcare that's free and maternity until the kids get into school. School is from 9-5 not from 9-3 like here or from 8-5. What else? They have health care for the children too - free and follow-up throughout. These are things we really need to fight for. Once that's in place all the rest with follow. The little battles will be easy to fight once we have that in place. If we don't have that in place we'll always be fighting for peanuts and ending up with all the responsibility on our shoulders. I think that is very important.

I will touch political issues if I may, if I am not exceeding my time, I feel very passionately about all this as you can see. We talk about the right of having a choice of having a baby or not and I think it's really important to fight against the back alley abortions and the legal abortions and so on. It is also very important for it to be a real choice. If I am a very poor sixteen year old girl or a very poor woman in some situation where I cannot possibly have a baby and I have legislation that protect maternity rights like these, that is a real choice. I can then say, I choose to have a baby because I know that the state is taking societal responsibility even if this guy doesn't care for my life and the child's. If I don't have that legislation what is seen as a choice is no choice. I have no choice than to go through the horrible experience of having an abortion. I lost two children by spontaneous abortion and I can't imagine wanting anybody to go through that and on purpose, on top. So I think it is very good to give the right to people to choose but it has to be a real choice, not a forced choice. Thank you.

Alma a Barranco-Mendoza - Question for Sheila: I am doing my PhD. in Computing Science, and I used to work in industry for many years and when I became pregnant I stopped working. Actually, I had twins and suddenly I was 75% income of my family which are lost. When I am looking for childcare I cannot afford it because it's all based on income tax from the previous year. Right now, I have no income and I do not qualify any kind of support because my family income was too high. Is there any way to work around this?

Sheila Davidson - The situation is so frustrating because we've got the research. We know what families are going through but we're dealing politically, and it isn't just the provincial government in B.C. We're dealing with a societal attitude about children being your responsibility. That comment I made before about the first five years of life being so critical - the research would fill this room - lots of it Canadian. Its good for children but we can't get governments to take the step to say that it is important even though at age five public education, every child in Canada is entitled and has to attend, but there is nothing available for you. So people like you in your income situation are being forced to choose underground childcare which often is cheaper and which often is of much less quality, not always, but often. It is a political situation and it is about equality.

I am glad that you made that comment about Canadians not having enough people to have the next generation of income earners. It seems to me that it's such a simple equation. If we support it our families in terms of being able to work and have children, there would be more kids. It doesn't take rocket science. I don't get it.

Barbara Waldern - I just wanted to respond to Janis because kind of a different point of view when talking about identifying women as working women. Just to clarify there, I don't see their contradiction with understanding women in terms of their family related roles. I think though that the issues and conditions of women are best understood and we can see women as working women and including various unpaid work as well, unpaid family work as well as volunteer work.

Kumari Beck - I just want to bring it back to my experience, I guess, which is I've come back to graduate school as a mature student and the first shock of this was waiting in line for my library card for three hours with a bunch of 18 year olds wondering what the heck am I doing back here? I really related to a number of things that all of you mentioned and I really like your imagine of the calibration. I find this a constant adjustment. My question to all of you on the panel is there something that, in terms of awareness raising or doing, because I've encountered a numbers of attitudes and not just from male professors but strangely enough, from some women academics who believe or who have questioned my choice. "Well you should either do the kids or come to class on time" Reinforcing that this is a this or a that. I find it very frustrating, particularly as I said, that we have to constantly make choices about, as you said, well a choice is not a choice. Well there are some things are not choices for those of us who are really busy mums. We either have to choose conferences to go to or no, we can't write papers, we can't do this. So are there things that you've done or are there things that we can establish or model that kind of combat this kind of attitude?

Janis Rutherford (?) - There is a group on campus of mature graduate students who meet regularly and provide support for each other. I imagine family obligations would play a large part of what they are trying to deal with. Let's be honest, there are an awful lot of young faculty now too who really don't understand how you can do a degree and have a family at the same time. You are not giving enough attention to one or the other. I would recommend getting in touch with that group for every mature graduate student.

Malgorzata Dubiel - I would like to support what Veronica said. That some of the changes will be possible only when this will be perceived as a societal issue. Now, one of the respected women scientist, I don't know the name, said that yes you can have a full career and yes you can have a great marriage and yes you can be a wonderful mother but never more than two out of those three at the same time. This was the situation now because it's not enough to have boundless energy and even sometimes supportive friends. There are expectations and what is in the society has to change and of course what we're doing even when SUFA reviewed policies, this is all part of it. Talking about it loud is the second thing because no matter what you find about your particular solution, we need to talk about it and share personal experiences like at this conference, we need to talk to our colleagues and to everyone possible because normally, we're normally we are too busy to talk about these things. Not that we don't want to - we are too busy. And sometimes women will tell you why your not choosing sometimes because they know how difficult or how not quite possible it is to have it all. It is not necessarily that people tell you things like this, feel that you should choose sometimes underlying message is well, you can't do this. But don't give up.

Participant - This is just my experience. I would like to say what I did as a parent. I wanted to attended a conference in Ottawa in 1993. I was in Victoria, B.C. and my partner was in Washington, D.C. and I had two young kids and the used to go to the daycare. I had an agreement with my partner that he would come and take care of children when I went to the conference ..... but last moment he said that he would not able to come but he was willing to provide three tickets to my children. Without having any kind, his career was also at the very initial stage at that time - he was not able to quit

What I did was call the conference organizers so that they would be able to provide childcare for two of my younger children, including Saturday and Sunday for four days. The conference organizer readily accepted my proposal and mentioned that I am very glad that you are coming from far away, from Victoria. I just wanted to share my experience. Sometimes there are little bit, its individual experiences. It is not a government policy or not ____ policy but still staying in touch with the faculty members sometimes the academy ____ to those who provide some kind of feedback how to go beyond to go beyond you own financial ____. Thank you.

Barbara Waldern - From the Labor Union point of view, I think one thing we have to think about is how it's considered normal to be in a situation of overwork constantly. Somehow, or other in the academic world we're expected to work any hour of day, any day of the week in order to get things done. I think we really have to resist that whole notion and get some kind regular hours and cap on our hours, at least in practice, you know. Because in TSSU we face this all the time, thinking our members, TAs and TMs, get contracts where they have certain number of hours that they're supposed to stick to. We try to point out that you should log your hours and try and keep within that or if you really can't avoid it you should really be asking for compensation or some other arrangement. So often people don't track their hours and so often they feel that they have to impress their peers to succeed and to give a good impression and not be a bother they need to be overworking all the time.

Marge - I wanted to make a comment. I am Marge from Geography: For faculty, who are in their tenure period, there is no question on whether you can overwork or not, you have to overwork. So fitting in children and that period of tenure is, for many people, virtually impossible. I wanted to emphasize that. I think women are smart enough to notice that and therefore they don't choose that route. I, myself have tenure and two children but I had them after tenure. That worked out but that is not always possible. If anyone has any comments on that, that would be great.

Participant - It's kind of a harebrained thought, I guess. Just a quick detail about my life so far. I worked in cultural industries and also had the good fortune to work for a professor, the last couple of years, who has been really receptive to and understanding my situation as a single parent of two children. In cultural industries everyone does that as a labor of love recognizes that you have a life. Everyone knows me and the kids come with me sort of thing. I am just wondering, I brought the kids with me, I brought them with me guest lectures for example. There would be me and the kids, 7 & 9, the only two girls there. I have crayons to keep them occupied, one on either side. I am just wondering if there are any kinds of events that happen on campus that invite people to bring their family with them. The kids actually love it, they think its great and I wouldn't want to do it every day but once a year to be able to do that. I love my education. I am beginning a PhD. in the Faculty of Education in September. I'm trying to instill in them how wonderful education and learning is and I'm really excited about it and they are excited to come with me. I wonder if dads and mums in this institution even have one day a year that we did something like that. That maybe some of the focus away from being the moms and kids and all families learning together.

Yvonne Tabin - I brought my daughter to work one day last year on bring your child work day. It was really wonderful because it gave her a real sense of the kinds of things that I do at work. She could connect names to faces and it integrated what I do away from home with home. It would be wonderful if the university could do something like that where we wouldn't necessarily have to wait to take advantage of the opportunity but could make a place for families as well.

Veronica Dahl - I think it would be good to incorporate what SFUFA is doing to provide us more family oriented environment. It shouldn't be a once a year event. I insisted, when I started this complaint for babysitting, every time they asked me to come here on a Saturday to talk to high school students I said I will if you provide babysitting for my kids. Now we have to be really firm on that. We shouldn't be asked to come extra hours, nights, Saturdays to any activity if they are not ready to provide babysitting. It's a lot cheaper to provide on a basis for everybody, like hire one babysitter for every five kids, or whatever, than to give on an individual basis. Every time they organize something on a Saturday, the University should provide a babysitter, a bonded babysitter to be here etc. You'd be surprised if you do that, or if you invite kids with their parent, many men would start bringing them. When I had my first baby, some of the people in the department have had babies, and I had the idea of having a baby party in my home. I thought, well this way I will meet all the wives, right? Not a single one came...all these men and I were there with all these babies because I guess the wives figured this is an opportunity for a rest. Maybe if we do that we will see more men taking care of babies and children. It has to be a university proposition. Same thing as when I was on the committee for Logic and Programming Conferences one year, I said to my colleagues that I want babysitting during conferences to be offered to attendees. Of course, they all laughed and I was the only woman. These days, many years, I am the President of Association for Logic and Programming but before being it I was the conference chair or organizer. I blended it into the policy that they have to provide babysitting for people presenting papers, at least. It is happening but if we don't ask for it, more than timidly, not just once a year, every even that involves after hours commitments. This one should have had babysitting. We have to have it into our heads that it is our right. If we don't think its our right and it doesn't occur to us to claim it, no one will claim it for us. We have to push the university to put it into place.

Cher Hill - Just to clarify, we didn't offer to provide babysitting but to reimburse people for babysitting costs.

Veronica Dahl - I stand corrected.