Thanks for Typing

The academic wife: who is she today?

• The Sociological Review • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In Episode 6 we’re talking about contemporary gendered inequalities of academic labour. Our guests are Katherine Twamley, Professor of Sociology at UCL’s Social Research Institute and Charlotte Faircloth, Associate Professor of Social Science also based at UCL’s Social Research Institute. As well as discussing their recent study exploring how families with children experienced the COVID-19 pandemic which lifted the curtain on gendered dynamics underpinning everyday life, we’re getting their take on what it’s like to be an ‘academic wife’ today.

Credits

Guests: Katherine Twamley and Charlotte Faircloth
Hosts: Ros Edwards and Val Gillies
Producer: Chris Garrington
Music: The Beat of Nature, Olexy 
Artwork: Krissie Brighty-Glover

Guest Bios

Katherine Twamley is a sociologist and founding Programme Director of the UCL BSc Sociology undergraduate programme (2018-2022). She chairs the UCL Sociology Network - the cross-university group for sociologists at UCL - and is an editorial board member of The Sociological Review and editor of the Routledge Sociological Futures book series. Katherine’s research focuses on gender, love and intimacy, social policy, and families, with a particular interest in India and the Indian diaspora. Katherine recently led the British Academy funded FACT-COVID study (with Charlotte Faircloth and Humera Iqbal) which explores how families with children have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic across ten different countries. She tweets @KTwamley.

Charlotte Faircloth is an Associate Professor of Social Science in the UCL Social Research Institute. With colleagues in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at Kent, Charlotte is co-author of Parenting Culture Studies published by Palgrave (2014, with a new edition due out in 2024). She also recently co-edited Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics published by Routledge and is co-editor of numerous journal special issues, including Sociological Research Online, the Journal of Family Issues and Anthropology and Medicine. She is co-editor of Family Life in a Time of Covid: International Perspectives (2023).

Episode Resources

Find out more about Thanks for Typing at The Sociological R

Ros Edwards:

Welcome to Thanks for Typing, a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers' wives to studies that laid the foundations of modern sociology. I'm Ros Edwards and I'm a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton.

Val Gillies:

And I'm Val Gillies, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Westminster.

Ros Edwards:

Over the last decade, Val and I have been researching the role that the wives of social researchers played in post war British studies. Using archival materials and diaries kept by the wives of well known sociologists, we've been piecing together their central involvement in groundbreaking social research of families, class and community life.

Val Gillies:

In this podcast, we reveal the major but unrecognised contributions sociologists' wives have made to the discipline and consider the implications of these overlooked collaborations for the development of social knowledge both then and now.

Ros Edwards:

In episode six, we're talking about the contemporary gendered inequalities of academic labour with Katherine Twamley and Charlotte Faircloth of University College London. Katherine is a Professor of Sociology at UCL's Social Research Institute, and her research focuses on gender, love and intimacy, social policy, and families. Charlotte is Associate Professor of Social Science, also at the Social Research Institute. And her research has thrown light on various aspects of parenting, parenting culture and child care. If we can start with you, Katherine. COVID lifted the curtain on the gendered dynamics that underpinned everyday life, or at least it lifted it for a while. And you and Charlotte together with your colleague, Humera Iqbal, you've done some really telling international collaborative research on family lives during the pandemic, would you just give us an overview of that?

Katherine Twamley:

So we did a 10 country collaborative study during the height of the pandemic, so 2020 and 2021. And we were really focused on families with children and their experiences of lockdown and the in between periods of lockdown during that period. And we wanted to look at families with children, because we were very interested in the kind of labour and then negotiation of what that was going to be like dealing with the shutdown of childcare institutions, and that kind of thing. Although that didn't happen across all 10 of the countries. For example, Sweden was one of the 10 countries. It was a really, really fascinating project, working with colleagues in all these different countries, who had different policies and different experiences of the pandemic. But what was quite fascinating to us, was also the fact that across all of the 10 countries, we did find evidence that women were taking on much more of the domestic and care labour and what we called COVID labour during this time, you know, even when there was different kinds of cultural institutional ideas about family and risk, and indeed the COVID virus, we still found that was kind of an enduring aspect. You might have remembered that just as sort of the very beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people thought this might be a moment of transition in terms of divisions of gendered labour. But in fact, we didn't really find that across the 10 countries. And of course, that's been supported by other studies as well.

Ros Edwards:

Yeah, I find that idea of COVID labour that you developed, I find that quite a captivating concept. If we turn to women in academia, particularly, a little while back, Ann Oakley characterised women in academia, as mainly doing the academic housework. She was using it to describe the sort of servicing work that women academics do, the precarious roles that they often occupy, as contract researchers and so on. So, Charlotte, do you think COVID has left any lasting impacts for academic women? Has it loosened or embedded the servicing work?

Charlotte Faircloth:

I should say, this isn't a sort of area that I've explored, you know, empirically, through my own research, but through reading the work of others. I think it was sort of evident that during COVID, a lot of the kind of discrepancies you know gender discrepancies around the division of labour were sort of, as Katherine says, reinscribed, rather than sort of challenged, and so that, yeah, the gender division between couples, I think there was some research sort of time use research done that as to how sort of couples divvied up the paid work and unpaid work. It was actually only where women were the sort of main breadwinner that the amount of kind of unpaid labour was the same. In terms of sort of academic housework, I mean, I think that's whether COVID kind of actually reinscribe that or challenged it, I'm not sure that I would be able to say, but I think there is fairly good evidence around the gendering of certainly the more kind of pastoral roles within academic work. And I think there is some sort of truism in the phrase you know, if you want something done, ask a busy woman. I noticed in preparation for the podcast you sent round a kind of Mumsnet thread about the way in which kind of academic roles are gendered. One of the sort of commentators on there was just sort of pointing out that actually, there's a sort of gatekeeping, I guess, by some of the men in her department who were quite good at being inefficient, and therefore not asked to take on these roles, unlike a lot of the women had in her department who were good at it, and were therefore sort of asked to do more of it.

Ros Edwards:

Yes, we might come back to that Mumsnet that thread in a while. I mean, Val and I have mainly looked at the contributions of some of the foundational studies of modern British sociology, the contributions that were made by the academics' wives in the post war period, we've been looking at women such as Phyllis Wilmott and Pat Marsden, and Sheila Jackson, and obviously, universities have changed since then, there is more of a presence of women academics. Women have got greater status and recognition in the academy. But as you just pointed out, Charlotte, the gendered inequalities in academia, they are still there. And so I'd like to ask you both why do you think that is? Katherine, why do we appear to have these ingrained imbalances in gender status and academic roles?

Charlotte Faircloth:

I mean, if we refer back to Ann Oakley's writing around this, she talks about the masculine nature of the career and the academic sphere and other workers. You know, other scholars like Acker, Shipman, she refers to Virginia Woolf, Ann Oakley does in her her writing. And I think that is really important. I mean, the contemporary work sphere is built on the assumption of a male worker without care responsibilities, and the kinds of things that we are asked to do. And the achievements that we're meant to have are based on that assumption. I mean, for me, there's a very strong parallel between academic housework and domestic housework, that's why the same term is used. The value accorded to the kinds of servicing work, the care work and domestic work is much less than to the kinds of work which is associated with the public sphere. And in academia, we would equate that with, you know, publications, so called outputs, as they're called, in the UK. I think if we want to see a change, we have to see a change in the value that we accord to different forms of work. So I'm thinking here of, I guess, Nancy Frasier's work, we need to shift from a universal breadwinner model to a universal care worker model. And that is a really slow process. And one of the ways that, you know, my work has been centred on thinking about that is through bringing men into care work through for examples, policies, like parental leave, and that that might be one way in which we can see a sort of a broader shift in values and participation in different forms of work.

Ros Edwards:

Yeah, I think that's a really telling point. I don't know if you've got anything to add to that Charlotte about the way from your work on parenting, and what gets valued, but also thinking about academia, and our own experiences of what gets valued, institutionally?

Charlotte Faircloth:

Absolutely. I mean, I think there's, again, sort of fairly good evidence that the gender gap, you know, obviously, it varies by discipline, in terms of sort of numbers of men and women in the field is sort of, let's say, relatively, even, you know, in early career stages, but as you sort of progress up, it becomes narrower and narrower. The number of kind of female professors, for example, is, you know, much lower than the number of male professors. And I guess sort of linking to work around the gender gap more broadly, you often see that disparity becoming more pronounced around the time when couples have children and suddenly care work does sort of, you know, come into the equation in a slightly different way. And I think, yeah, it's quite typical that around that point in a lot of women's careers, because we have a highly sort of gendered parenting culture, even where couples are, let's say, both academics earning the same salary. I think women often internalise some of those messages around good parenting in ways that are different to men. Not all men, but some. And you then sort of see this kind of fork emerge where, you know, women go on to the sort of part time track, for example, where they're fitting in their professional work around care work, drop offs, and pickups, and so on and so forth, which as Katherine sort of pointed out often means that it's then really hard to find the time to do the more kind of masculinist outputs that we're judged on professionally, such as grant applications, international conference presentations, so on and so forth. So yes, I think just to sort of echo what Katherine was saying, really, you do sort of see these patterns emerge over individuals careers and then sort of matches wider disparities that we see in society more broadly.

Val Gillies:

Academic workloads have really spiralled as well, haven't they over the past sort of a couple of decades, really. And so if you're trying to build up a successful career, as an academic, there often isn't enough time even for sort of basic domestic chores, let alone caring for children as well. So Katherine, what do you think it means today to be an academic wife or partner?

Katherine Twamley:

I was actually just discussing this last night with a academic that was visiting from the US. And she was lamenting the fact that she did not have a wife, she has a husband, but she doesn't have a wife. And, of course, this common idea that a wife would do so much more for her than any husband would ever do, which, sadly, is borne out by statistics in terms of participation and domestic care, and so on, and so forth. I don't think it has really shifted much to the idea of what a partner would do, because, as you say, although there are more dual working households now the workload has increased. So we do need more support at home, in order to prop up the academic system, which relies on us as academics to work well beyond contracted hours, in order to stay on top of our workload. Although there are shifts in work in terms of women's participation in paid work, if the workload keeps increasing, then we're spreading the intensity of work and we're spreading, as Charlotte's work has also shown, spreading the intensity somewhat of childcare. So the demands placed on us both at home and in paid work, are just increasing. And it's, it's not sustainable. And indeed, we do see people dropping out of academia as it's, it's often called. This is maybe why I haven't really thought about it before. But this is maybe why we recruit so many PhD students. And, and then postdocs is this, this huge triangle relies on just a small number of people kind of inverted commas making it to the top, you know, it's very much propped up by those part time associate lecturers, people who are doing so much of the service and teaching work who are on precarious contracts, I guess that helps prop up the system.

Charlotte Faircloth:

I think, actually the module of the academic wife, you know, as this sort of person who, let's think historically perhaps didn't sort of undertake paid work outside of the home, but was very much there to sort of support the man who was the breadwinner, and the academic. I mean, that to me, just does not really ring true these days, certainly working at a central London University. I can't think of many people who could afford to, you know, have the academic as the breadwinner, really, you certainly couldn't afford to live in London or anywhere in central London, on one academic salary. So actually, what you see sort of more often is the people that can sort of afford to stay in academia, arguably, both men and women, are those that have spouses who you know, do something else that's higher paying and/or can then afford some support with the childcare, etc. to enable this long hours culture. I don't sort of recognise that sort of academic wife who's around to soak up everything in terms of the unpaid labour, certainly, in a historical sense anyway. I'm sure there were one or two and perhaps different generations of academics, that's still the case, but certainly not amongst our contemporaries I wouldn't say Katherine.

Katherine Twamley:

Not so much in London, I agree, the cost of living really impacts on that. I do speak with male colleagues, and a lot of them do end up telling me that their wife works part time or fewer hours than they do and, and therefore takes up a greater greater proportion of the home care and the child

Val Gillies:

I suppose what I was wondering really is whether, work. you know, academic couples, then one might end up having their career prioritised at the expense of the other.

Katherine Twamley:

Certainly in my research, which hasn't focused primarily on academics, but has you know, so I recently I did a project, which was following couples at the transition to parenthood, from pregnancy to about 18 months afterwards. And from pregnancy, already, those couples were talking about prioritising the man's career, which didn't necessarily mean the woman was going to give up paid work entirely or career aspirations entirely. But the reasoning, the given reasoning, anyway, around that was that really, you can only have one sort of intensive career in the contemporary society in which we're living in the UK in which childcare is very expensive. In which, you know, we understand ourselves too, that we ought to be extremely present for our children, the ideas about what children need, and that's the way they narrated it, therefore, you know, the woman will say I will still work and maybe I will return to my career when the children need me a bit less when they're in their teens. But one of our careers should be focused on we think it should be his because either she had already sort of selected a career which would be more conducive to her stepping back and stepping back in or working part time, or he was sort of narrated as having better prospects which to be frank, the statistics also show he would have better prospects, because of the gender pay gap and because of the fatherhood bonus, as in when men become fathers, they start to do better in their career and the motherhood penalty when mothers have children, they tend to do worse in their career. And of course, they're sort of feeding into and perpetuating that. But they also recognise that to be true.

Charlotte Faircloth:

I think, also, for a lot of couples, it becomes this kind of question about, well, what do I actually value in my life? You know, there's no easy answer to that. I think one of the big questions in this sort of second wave feminist movement was around access to meaningful work for women as a sense of kind of purpose in the world, and obviously, being paid for that. And that being a grounds towards equality. But certainly amongst a lot of my contemporaries, I think there's this kind of feeling that we'll actually the rat race doesn't necessarily make me feel fulfilled, not, you know, maybe the domestic kind of like realm is one where I can sort of find meaning in those relationships, particularly with children. At the same time, as a lot of people recognise that, you know, escaping some of the drudgy, parts of that is also really important. So, I think, you know, as a society, we're a bit, we don't really have a set formula for that as to how to find meaning in your life. And, yeah, a lot of people are kind of grappling with that.

Ros Edwards:

Charlotte you raised that thread on our Mumsnet a while ago, when you were talking about that it was started by academics, the thread was discussing these distorted expectations of male academics, who had part time or stay at home partners. And so it seems to me that, whether it's the case or not, and also with thinking back to what Katherine was saying, it's an image that we have that male academics, have women partners, wives who are supporting them and doing things, not necessarily an overt image or an explicit image. But it does seem to be embedded into how we think about and operate in universities that were these old fashioned assumptions about who does the care work? And I don't know if you wanted to say a little bit more about that?

Charlotte Faircloth:

I think, yeah, there is obviously this sort of historical legacy. And if I think back to, you know, maybe the time when I was doing my PhD in Cambridge, there is this kind of model of, you know, as Katherine kind of alluded to, as well, the kind of male worker who is free of domestic kind of responsibilities. You know, if you think of the college system in Oxbridge, you know, everything is sort of taken care of for you. So it's very much this kind of male bachelor, who can come down to formal Hall in the evening to discuss with colleagues, these great ideas, and then you know, go home, finish off some work and get up in the morning, teach, etc, etc. And I think there's a bit of a sort of hangover of that in the sort of modern academic career as it's envisaged. I mean, looking at some of those threads on the post, there was, of course, there were parts of it that I recognise. I mean, I think the one of the sort of aspects that we're encouraged to do as academics is is around conferences. So international conference engagements are kind of, you know, highly prized and travel when you have small dependent people at home is really tricky. And, you know, the after work socialising, etc, etc. That said, I do think that things have shifted a bit. And, you know, in my experience of university departments more recently, there's been a lot of kind of efforts to, for example, only schedule meetings during core hours, so between something like ten and four, to enable people to do drop off and pick up. I think COVID has perhaps shifted some of the expectations around travel in quite a helpful way. And I think universities are becoming more aware of the need to kind of acknowledge care responsibilities, and how that might have shaped academic careers. Of course, it's not perfect. And of course, I think on a slightly more interpersonal level, some of these things get sort of overlooked. So there are some people who are very good at sort of being inefficient, as I said, and therefore don't get asked to do jobs that other people who are more let's say efficient do get asked to and that then ends up having impacts down the line on the kinds of work that they are able to do and be rewarded for. But yeah, I think it's I think things have changed in a positive way but there is obviously you know, further to go.

Ros Edwards:

Oh, so thank you so much Charlotte, and Katherine as well. That's some really insightful points there and and food for thought for us to take away. This is the final episode of our Thanks for Typing podcast. What we we're aiming to do with this podcast is to give contemporary sociologists a sense of the research as well as the domestic labour that wives have contributed historically, to the development of the discipline of sociology. And it's been an amazing journey from the postwar period of wives' hidden contributions, and then bringing us up to date through to the present of gendered inequalities of labour in contemporary academia with Charlotte and Katherine. Thinking back over their series as a whole, one recurrent theme that stood out for me is the great man narrative. Bruce Holsinger and Miriam David mentioned that in our very first episode, and I remember the message that Anna Funder and Dame Janet Finch left us with, in episode two about the importance of bursting the illusion that great men do it all on their own. And I love the way that Sophie Bridges and Chris Rennick reinforced that for us, in our third episode. They emphasise how postwar social research was often a collaborative production of knowledge with wives and family involved, but also how husbands and other social researchers might have acted to perpetuate that individual intellectual man story. And then there's Selina Todd's insightful explanation of this in Episode Four that postwar British sociologists were carving out careers in establishment institutions. So they felt the need to present their interests and their expertise as particular to them. And how about you Val? What stands out for you?

Val Gillies:

Well, I thought a really interesting theme that's run right throughout the podcast series is just how difficult it is to recover contributions that have been either lost or forgotten, and sometimes even quite deliberately hidden. It is such a painstaking job piecing together all those slivers and traces from the past to write women back in and there's so rarely a hard evidence trail showing exactly, you know, what it was that they contributed or achieved. So instead, we've got to span gaps, we've got to weave narratives and work with uncertainties as well, because otherwise we're reproducing a deeply flawed version of how social knowledge was produced and that has significant implications for the present.

Ros Edwards:

Thanks for that Val, because that is a really important message for us to take away as well. So this is this is it the final podcast, so thank you so much to you for listening. And thanks also to Chris Garrington and Krissie Brighty-Glover, our production team at Research Podcasts, and we hope you've enjoyed listening as much as we've enjoyed being in the conversation with so many interesting people. And we also hope that it's given you some food for thought about whose shoulders we sociologists really stand on.

Val Gillies:

Thanks for Typing is brought to you in partnership with the Sociological Review Foundation whose mission is to share sociologically imaginative insights on our world and help pave the way towards a more just future. Find out more about all of the Foundation's podcasts at the sociologicalreview.org

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Roz Edwards

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Val Gillies

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