Like any good economist, I generally consider opportunity costs before making major life decisions. So naturally, when I was thinking about leaving my full-time job for seven more years of graduate school, I calculated the cost of getting a Ph.D. against the cost of continuing on my current career track. I made a simple spreadsheet, logging lost wages, grad-school fees, and the higher earnings I might someday realize with a Ph.D. in hand.

Unfortunately, I left out an important figure: I forgot to calculate the cost of forgoing my prime childbearing years. I was young and optimistic about how long a Ph.D. would take me to complete. I was in a relationship, but still far enough away from the average marital age in the U.S. not to worry about tying the knot or starting a family. Nor did I give any thought to the discrimination—in hiring and in the form of lower wages and lost promotions—I might experience, even in academia, if I became a mother one day.

If I’d known then what I know now, my calculations would have looked a bit different.

Of course, I’m privileged to be able to get a Ph.D. in the first place, and I wouldn’t trade this opportunity for anything. But now that I’m just shy of 30, and I see my nonacademic friends having children, buying houses, and getting on with their lives, I’m starting to feel like they’ve passed me by on the road to adulthood. All I have to show for my time in grad school is my dissertation—which has been gestating for two years now, and which I’m hoping to push out within the next six months—some debt, and a rental apartment that neither my husband nor I can seem to find time to clean.

Here I am, at an age when people are typically starting a family, yet I’m nowhere near a position to even consider that possibility, since money and time—things I have in short supply as a grad student—are prerequisites for taking that leap.

In fact, it’s hard not to wonder: Is grad school (or an academic career, for that matter) even compatible with child-rearing? At one time, I might have said yes and touted the flexibility of an academic schedule. But now that I’ve been around the grad-school block for a while, I have my doubts. For starters, I’m not seeing a lot of successful female role models. Granted, I’m in economics, where scholars with two X chromosomes are few and far between, and tenured female scholars with children are practically an endangered species. But even when I look around at other academic disciplines, the numbers aren’t terribly encouraging.

For example: Married mothers of young children are 35 percent less likely to land tenure-track jobs than are married fathers of young children. Those same mothers are 33 percent less likely to land jobs than their single female counterparts without young children, noted Mary Ann Mason last year in The Atlantic. Meanwhile, more women with children seem to wind up working as adjuncts, as I noted in a previous column.

Then there are the attitudes. Grad school is supposed be a time for intensive study and research. It’s your initiation into the cult of academia; having a spouse or a child (or one on the way) may be viewed as a weakness or distraction. (Not so for male academics, but more on that later.) That perception seems due in large part to the fact that many female scholars have spouses who are scholars, too, and it’s still presumed by mentors and hirers that these women will put the careers of their spouses before their own. I’ve learned that female grad students who hint that they might want to start a family someday are often met with doubts about their seriousness as scholars, not offers of support. No wonder so many women remove their wedding rings before academic job interviews. I know I would.

If this isn’t enough to make some women nervous about the nexus of family planning and an academic career, there’s also the so-called ticking of the biological clock, which adds an extra layer of pressure and anxiety to an already stressful Ph.D.-training process. I’ve yet to meet a female grad student in her childbearing years who hasn’t thought about or talked with her female peers about having children, or had well-meaning family or friends remind her that her fertility may fall off a cliff after age 35.

Of course, not everyone wants to have children, and it’s a deeply personal choice. Nor do I mean to suggest that women who do shouldn’t pursue a Ph.D. or an academic career; they should just go into it with their eyes wide open. But for those of us who may want kids and a successful career, it’s a high-stakes struggle to figure out when’s the best time to start. I’m not sure there is one.

Some women decide to have children during graduate school and go on to have rewarding academic careers. While I greatly admire them, I simply don’t think I have the strength and stamina to raise a child and nurse a dissertation to completion at the same time. Most of the women I know are like me, trying to postpone thinking about it until after … whenever that is. Fortunately, my dissertation is distracting enough, for the most part, that I can bury the thoughts in my head about if and when to have children. But I do so with the knowledge that I’m still reasonably young. (According to Mason, the average age at which women get a Ph.D. is 33; those lucky enough to get tenure shouldn’t expect to do so before they’re 39.) I have no major concerns about my biological clock at present, but who knows if I’ll regret taking my fertility for granted in five years, when I’m 35, the age at which doctors start monitoring pregnancies for high risks?

In my own program, there’s a small cohort of married graduate students. But most of them are men, as are more than two-thirds of economics Ph.D. recipients. We’ve shared our frustrations about the difficulties of balancing a committed relationship with the all-consuming focus our graduate studies require. But I’m keenly aware that the issue of if and when to have children is less fraught for them than it is for me. I’d also wager that these men get far fewer comments on their age, and fewer questions from advisors about how their partners’ plans will affect their own post-graduation plans, than my female peers and I do.

As David Perry, an associate professor of history at Dominican University and a dedicated dad himself, notes in The Chronicle, male doctoral students who want to be fathers just “don’t see the issues linked to being an academic parent as their problem” because most of them aren’t subjected to the “overt kinds of sexism experienced by academic mothers.” Perry says, for example, that no one has ever questioned his work ethic to his face because he’s a parent. I know a number of women with Ph.D.’s and J.D.'s who wish they could say the same thing.

Sadly, such stories help explain why so many women throw in the academic towel and walk (or are unconsciously nudged) away from the tenure-track ring, and why those women who do make it to the top of the academic ladder are more likely to be child-free. They’re why I’ve re-examined the costs and benefits of staying in academia and decided to steer clear of the tenure track. And why I was even reluctant to write this piece in the first place.

I plan to pursue a career outside the academy in the area of labor and social justice, where I won’t have to plan my life around the rigid academic calendar, and where I hope I’ll be a little freer to live my life as I choose without having my membership card revoked for being a potential or actual mother. After all the effort I’ve put into getting a Ph.D., I want potential employers to see me for my degree and my qualifications, not my gender or my age. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll even have a shot at a rewarding career and a family.

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