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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You say he has an academic job?  Is he an assistant professor, who will be working toward tenure for the next six years?  I am a tenured prof, so I am surrounded by other academics, and I don't know a single male academic who was the default parent while working toward tenure.  In fact, the most successful mid-career scholars in my field are the men whose wives SAH or have less-intense careers.  The thing about academia is that the work is infinite, and the standards are vague.  You could always collect just one more set of data, publish just one more article, etc., and you never feel like it's enough until you've got tenure.  And then you're working toward full.  I know there are a lot of jobs that you can never "turn off" but academia is unusual simply because the work is self-driven and limitless.

So, I'd be thinking about how he's going to resist that pressure to publish more and more and more and focus on running the household while you pursue your career.

The research shows that the most likely person to get tenure is a married male, the most unlikely is a married female.  (Unmarried men and unmarried women fall in between.)  The typical explanation for these differences is that men are successful because women are running their personal lives, and women are unsuccessful professionally because they're having to run their family life too.

So, is your husband going to step outside of these well established patterns in academia and somehow be a default parent and a successful scholar?  There are certainly examples of men who have done it, but it takes commitment on their part to buck the dominant trends.[/quote]

Yes he is an assistant professor. I have a hard time with the idea of keeping a light career to support an academic career which frankly is not very lucrative. He claims he can easily work until 70 at top pay, but this does not help me sleep at night. What if he gets sick?

He plans to go for tenure at the end of next year if he gets an NSF grant, and has been encouraged to go early by the department. He is 36 and has many, many publications and citations. What he doesn’t have yet is a big grant.

Anyway, i can outearn him fairly soon if I am not mommy tracked, and this matters to me because I highly value financial security. [/quote]

Oof.  An academic who is trying to get NSF grants?  That is not the kind of scholar who can usually achieve work-life balance.  If he wants to convince you that he could be the default parent, I’d ask him to describe 2-3 scholars who he admires who prioritize their families.  Ask him really concrete questions about how they structure their work lives to do things like drop offs and pick ups, how often they travel for conferences/lectures/research, etc., and then ask him how he would do the same things. He needs to think really concretely about how he would detach from his work enough to raise kids.

FTR, you’re totally right that academia is not remunerative enough to merit the hours many people put into it.  But it’s a calling for some people.  Anyone who made the financial sacrifices to go into academia probably isn’t going to immediately recognize the sense in scaling back his own career so that his spouse can boost the HHI. [/quote]

Wow. All of this.  I have nothing to add.

-former academic[/quote]

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