Across higher education, early-career faculty who are also parents have a two-clock problem, and a new commentary co-written by Poole scholar Patrick Flynn offers some solutions.

Academia is unique, Flynn and his peers write in “The Two Clock Problem: Reimagining the Junior Faculty Experience Through a Commentary on Gabriel et al. (2023) and Livingston et al. (2024),” because of the distinct mix of flexibility and rigidity facing tenure-track faculty that often overlaps with naturally occurring childbearing years. Day-to-day, junior faculty parents have wide latitude in how they choose to spend their time. Research and writing tasks can shift fairly easily to accommodate parenting tasks.

In the background, though, the tenure clock is ticking. From their initial appointment, assistant professors have a fixed period to build a case for tenure. At NC State, tenure-track faculty get up to seven years to build a record across six responsibilities: teaching and student mentorship, research, extension and engagement with outside organizations, innovation, service to their discipline and service within the university. 

At the end of the fixed evaluation period, their fellow faculty assess that record and vote on whether to confer promotion and tenure. Those who don’t get promoted have to restart the clock at another institution or choose a different career track. Depending on the geographic area, there may not be many (if any) options for other academic jobs.

The second clock in the paper’s title is a biological one. The crucial years for achieving tenure are frequently also the ones when people start families and take on the unpredictable job of raising small children. Taking parental leave may compress the tenure timeline for early-career faculty, and those who get tenure clock extensions run risks of higher productivity expectations and/or grant funding challenges aligned with the extra time. Beyond parental leave for childbirth, the ongoing uncertainty of parenting demands create a tension for junior faculty who must discern where and how to spend their time and energy between career advancement and parenting.

For junior faculty parents, academic work and parenting are both valued domains. Yet, professional flexibility along with the dual, and at times dueling clocks, create challenges related to switching between these professional and parenting domains without incurring cognitive, emotional, and/or attitudinal costs. Thus, each of those jumps takes a toll, reducing productivity at work and raising stress levels at home.

“One of the great things about this job is the ability to craft your own schedule,” said Flynn, associate professor of management and Matthew and Soogi Hong Scholar. “But it’s not always easy to jump back and forth between doing research, spending time with your kids for a few hours, and then jumping back into your research.”

Flynn’s co-authors had similar experiences.

“Being a parent of young children and a pre-tenure faculty member involves constant juggling,” said Christina Hymer, assistant professor and Douglas A. and Brenda Horne Faculty Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business. “I stay close to my to-do list to help track all task priorities and dependencies.”

“Despite my best efforts to be present and listen to what my children were communicating, I would often find my brain stuck on the research issue I had been addressing earlier in the day,” added Sherry Thatcher, Regal Distinguished professor of management and entrepreneurship at Haslam. 

“I’ve come to realize that it’s less about finding a perfect balance and more about making thoughtful choices about where to devote my time and energy,” said Haoying (Howie) Xu, assistant professor and Photios Paulson ‘59 Endowed Fellow at the Stevens Institute of Technology School of Business,

The paper makes four recommendations to help junior faculty thrive at home and in the academy:

• Make Workloads More Predictable

Department heads and university administrators could reduce junior faculty stress and costly domain switching by stacking required teaching loads into single terms, assigning service duties within local K–12 school hours, and instituting dedicated meeting-free time blocks. 

• Make Tenure Systems More Flexible

Higher ed leaders could give junior faculty essential flexibility by automatically pausing the tenure clock for parental or care-giving leave, avoiding heightened performance expectations for those who get extensions, and allowing tenure candidates space to explain tenure clock disruptions to their evaluators.

• Create Infrastructure for Caregivers

Universities could help junior faculty manage disruptions by expanding access to on-campus or emergency childcare and offering vouchers to help pay for childcare. Academic conference organizers could make their events more accessible to junior faculty with on-site childcare and family options.

• Reform Publication Timelines

Journal publishers could help junior faculty plan their research more effectively by adopting proposal-based submission models and interactive review formats, as well as clearly communicating review timelines.

These reforms amount to a “whole-person management” approach that would ease domain switching tension and costs, creating benefits for junior faculty parents and also scholars at every stage of their careers. Adapting them to the circumstances of fields outside academia could be helpful to working caregivers in other industries, too.

“Who we are outside of work can be very important for who we are at work,” Flynn said. “I hope we can push this conversation forward about finding ways to support that for our colleagues.”

“The Two Clock Problem: Reimagining the Junior Faculty Experience Through a Commentary on Garbiel et al. (2023) and Livingston et al. (2024)” appears in Group & Organization Management.