The nexus between family and work roles of academic women in Israel: Reality and representation

This study examines the relationships between family responsibilities and scientific and scholarly productivity of women in academia. It is commonly believed that faculty women are less productive than their male colleagues because of childbearing and other domestic duties. Though this assumption seems logical, it is not supported by evidence from a growing number of studies including the present. The family-career nexus of faculty women in Israel is examined on two levels: the actual—namely the association between number of children and rates of publications, and the perceptual—the ways in which faculty women perceive and describe the problem. The data show that the presence of children does not reduce research productivity, and that respondents accept their family obligations as matter of fact. The paper attempts to account for the main finding that women with more children do not publish less, but somewhat more than women without children or with one child, and also discusses several explanations that have been forwarded in other studies.