Major goal is to increase number of women pursuing careers in higher education
Princeton University has expanded its package of family-focused initiatives for graduate students while also aiming to increase the number of women pursuing careers in higher education.
According to administrators at the university, the primary source of gender imbalances among faculty nationwide is the challenges that graduate students and postdoctoral researchers face before they apply for their first faculty position. This is particularly the case in the sciences and engineering.
Princeton has established a "continuum" of support that the university believes is the first in academia to address the full range of obstacles such as maternity leave, child care, research travel, home ownership and other stumbling blocks that often discourage graduate students and particularly female students from persisting along the path toward an academic career.
Among the key initiatives is a childbirth policy adopted by the Graduate School that provides a three-month suspension of academic work for birth mothers, and financial support plus extension of academic deadlines for birth mothers or primary caregivers.
"We are working systematically to confront head-on the challenges facing women and families in higher education by approaching graduate school as the beginning of a continuum for academic life that moves to postdoctoral research and then to faculty positions," said Joan Girgus, professor of psychology and special assistant to the dean of the faculty on matters relating to gender equity. "This is something we hope every graduate school in the country will embrace."
When administrators look at the applicant pools for assistant professor positions at Princeton, they find significantly fewer women than one would expect given the national pool of doctorates, Professor Girgus said, and the picture seems to be similar at other research universities. A set of six initiatives will address the problems that reduce the pool of women applying to assistant professor positions.
The university’s six initiatives provide: the three months of maternity leave, along with the extension of academic deadlines and financial support to give doctoral students an additional term to complete their studies; need-based grants for child care; heavily subsidized backup care when a student’s regular caregiving arrangements are disrupted; a mortgage program to help graduate students buy homes at reduced costs; Carebridge work-life counseling; and a travel fund to allow graduate students to provide care for their dependent children while they attend academic conferences important for their careers.
The launch of the programs has been phased in, beginning with the mortgage program in December of last year and culminating with the travel program this month. Dean of the Graduate School William Russel said these initiatives should support efforts to increase the representation of women, particularly in the sciences and engineering.
"Helping students with aspirations for academic or other extremely demanding careers start their families earlier is important given the length of time it takes to achieve a Ph.D., the need in many fields for a postdoctoral fellowship and the pressures of the pre-tenure years," Dean Russel said. "Other institutions are moving in the same direction, although we understand that many are not blessed with our resources. Even so, we hope the steps taken by Princeton will set the standard in some ways."
Princeton in 2005 became the first university in the country to grant automatic tenure extensions for both male and female faculty when they adopt or give birth to a child during tenure pursuit. By automatically granting an addition of one year to the tenure review period for each new child, the move popularly dubbed "stopping the tenure clock" removed the stigma from requesting tenure extensions.
Soon after launching the tenure initiative, officials in the offices of the dean of the faculty, the Graduate School, financial aid and human resources began to explore why so many assistant professors were confronting the work#-#life challenge at this critical time in their careers. "The reason was that many assistant professors come to this point because of what I call the converging of clocks: the ticking tenure clock and the ticking biological clock," Professor Girgus said. "So what we’ve done in looking at benefits for University employees is to include graduate students in each step before they have to confront this convergence."

