Ashley Mears: preference

Transcript context

…If we’re concerned about inequality, including for women who have a childbearing cycle, shouldn’t we just abolish tenure? Right. Or maybe not abolish it, but maybe change the terms of it so that the clock doesn’t completely overlap with the so-called biological clock for women who want to have families. Perhaps there could be a way to lengthen it, or pause it, or start it in a way that makes it fit better with having kids. I had my kids right when I got tenure. I had my first child — she arrived right after I received my positive tenure decision. I didn’t plan it that way, but it worked out really luckily. But I remember in graduate school, a couple of people had kids in grad school. And I was thinking, “No, this is ridiculous. That’s not the right plan.” I could never imagine having kids in grad school, but actually, it does make sense to. In grad school, you have a lot more control over your time. You’re a lot more flexible, fewer demands. And you can stretch your grad school clock in a way. So, in some ways, sometimes looking back, I think that’s also an option, to maybe loosen up the expectation that women have kids after their careers are all stitched up. Because that’s what I followed, and it worked out for me, but it can’t work out for everyone. And it also was quite a big stress for those six years. If you think about the question, what is your unified theory of you? You have this early career as a fashion model and your current career as an academic and also as an author. They’re all winner-take-all sectors. Do you think of yourself as, in some sense, you keep on doing the same thing in different areas? Or do you think of your current career as a rebellion against what you did before?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.