Meeting Abstract
One of the greatest challenges for faculty is balancing a meaningful home life with the requirements of teaching, scholarship, and service. Policies concerning parental leave, pausing the tenure clock, and eldercare vary greatly from institution to institution and can be confusing or contradictory. We gathered information about these policies as of October 2015 from institutions participating in our NSF ADVANCE grant, which created a network of female STEM faculty at undergraduate institutions, and compared them to those reported in Taylor & Dilks (2015 J. Div. Higher Ed.), who studied all institutions that received NSF ADVANCE grants before 2012. Compared to this larger sample, our institutions are smaller and a larger proportion are private. Parental leave policies in our institutions varied widely. Almost one-third offer little more than the minimum leave without pay required by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), while almost one-fourth provide a teaching release of one semester. The same pattern holds for a tenure clock extension for the birth mother. Almost one-third of our institutions have no policy but almost 40% provide an automatic one-year extension upon request. None of our institutions and few of the larger sample provide anything beyond the provisions of FMLA for eldercare. These comparative data could permit faculty to negotiate for enhanced benefits at their home institutions.
