The Murphy Brown alternative

One of my interviewers had had the postdoc several years before; immediately after, she got a faculty position there. She was the success story for the postdoc, and I was completely impressed. She had mentioned during an earlier meal together that she had recently become a parent, so I was even more impressed when she mentioned during her interview that she had gotten a prestigious multi-year federal junior faculty grant on the second try. During the interview I was hanging on her every word hoping to glean information about how she accomplished this amazing feat. I was a bit puzzled when she mentioned that she had applied for a job in her home state since it was not even close to as good as this school. Towards the end of the interview, while trying to sell me on the department being so family-friendly, she mentioned that she had given birth as a single parent.

I'm all for the Murphy Brown alternative, and it's something that I plan to do if I need to; I hope I won't. In fact, I find the prospect completely petrifying. To have children before having a husband means risking never finding a husband; few men have the patience to help raise someone else's children, even an anonymous donor's. To wait to have children until finding a husband means risking never having one's own biological children. I hope to God that I never face this choice between romantic love and biological children. Going by all the fertility statistics I've seen, though, I'll need to start thinking about this choice about 3-4 years from now.

It's always been a sad fact of academia that the successful women are more likely to be the unmarried ones. A study of women's success in academia found that after you control for having children, women were equally successful as men. As (I believe) Virginia Woolf said, "Everyone needs a wife," that is, someone to look after their life details.

After meeting this woman, I am starting to think that this price for success might just be too high. I now have no doubts in my competence that I could be a full professor with zillions of dollars of grants, publishing in the top journals and tackling the most important problems in the field. I know for sure that I don't care a rat's ass about the most important problems compared with having a biological family. It's not even something that I need to stop a moment to consider.

It's not news to me that it happens that women who wanted children aren't in the position to have them as they'd intended: the stories are legion. What's shocking to me (but maybe it shouldn't be) is the irony. She's academically a phenomenal role model to have gotten this prestigious grant. There's no free lunch, and every hour spent at work is an hour spent away from family and personal life. We, the academic hoi polloi, are often left to imagine the personal costs of luminaries' success, such as spouses and children left behind during conferences.

The personal costs of a role model's success --- and therefore my potential personal costs of optimizing my work decisions versus personal factors --- don't get any clearer. Worse, she may pay an additional price in her professional advancement: I guess that she's looking at the much less prestigious position in her home state because it's near her family, and she'd like the moral support.