Workplace Faculty Friendships and Work-Family Culture
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Workplace Faculty Friendships and Work-Family Culture Megumi Watanabe 1 & Christina Falci 2
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Although various work-family policies are available to faculty members, many underuse these policies due to concerns about negative career consequences. Therefore, we believe it is important to develop an academic work culture that is more supportive of workfamily needs. Using network data gathered from faculty members at a Midwestern university, this study investigated the relationship between friendship connections with colleagues and perceived work-family supportiveness in the department. It also explored the role of parental status in the relationship for men and women. Results show that faculty with larger friendship networks have more positive perceptions of work-family culture compared to faculty with smaller friendship networks, for all faculty except women without children. Keywords Faculty . Work-Life Integration . Work-Family Culture . Social Networks Increasing faculty gender diversity is essential to the future success of academia. Men and women often have different backgrounds, interests, and approaches toward research. Thus gender diversity within the academic workforce should enrich the process of knowledge creation (Fehr 2008). The reality, however, is that women are still under-represented relative to men, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) Megumi Watanabe is a University Education Administrator at Hiroshima University in Japan. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests are in work-family integration in academia, survey methodology, and social network analysis. Christina Falci is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research focuses on how social networks can aid in our understanding of mental health problems and workplace inequality.
* Megumi Watanabe [email protected] Christina Falci [email protected]
1
Hiroshima University, 1-3-2 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima 739-8511, Japan
2
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1400 R St, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
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(National Science Foundation 2015). Despite the increase in the number of women earning advanced degrees, women are less likely than men to stay in academia and move up the ladder to become full professors (Goulden, Mason, and Frasch 2011). To retain more women and increase gender diversity among faculty, we cannot avoid discussing work and family life. Researchers repeatedly point out that raising a family while managing a heavy tenure-line faculty workload is challenging (Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden 2013; Ward and WolfWendel 2012). The challenge of combining faculty work and family life is especially difficult for women who are disproportionately responsible for housework and childcare (Misra, Lundquist, and Templer 2012). As such, women are mo
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