One of the questions I like to ask people as they’re considering what they might do after academia is what their ideal workday looks like. When do you get up? What do you put on? Where do you go? What kind of work do you perform? Who do you work with?

Often, people respond that they can’t think of an ideal workday, that everything they consider sounds stupid or pointless or wrong somehow.

Then they tell me that they’re afraid that, in their heart of hearts, they’re just lazy and don’t want to work at all.

Oh sweetie, that’s not it

When I ask them for evidence that they’re actually, at heart, lazy, they usually can’t come up with any real examples. Maybe they’ve procrastinated sometimes, especially around a big or meaningful project.

Most of the time, in fact, these same people have taken on extra work. They’ve volunteered for non-profits or organized fellow graduate students.

They aren’t lazy. They’re exhausted.

Burnout just happens to look like lazy

People who are basically lazy aren’t likely to end up in academia, because academia involves juggling insane workloads with really tough intellectual effort. No truly lazy person is going to sign up for that.

In fact, the kind of people who do sign up for academia are much more likely to be the kind of people who thrive on challenge, who love learning new things, who take on too much.

And let’s face it – academia is not a place that generally values work-life balance. In fact, it’s the kind of place that points fingers at any time away from work as evidence that you aren’t sufficiently committed.

That, my friends, leads us all straight to burnout.

The way back out

One of the perks of academia is that, other than classes and required meetings, most of the deadlines are, shall we say, not immediate. In other words, there’s often wiggle room to let other things slide for a time while you sleep and commune with nature and watch bad television and do whatever else will help you recover.

Aha! You say. I already slack off like that!

But recovery takes longer than I’m guessing you’re giving yourself. It takes big swathes of time, but it doesn’t actually take that long once you give yourself big swathes of time. Two weeks. Maybe three.

When you can give yourself a real recovery, you can often start to tell the difference between “I love this job / career / program but holy hell, I’m crispy burnt-out” and “oh dear god, get me out of here.”

In that space, you’ll be able to tell what your ideal workday looks like. You’ll be able to notice which jobs or careers or whatevers actually excite you. And from there, you can figure out your Next Right Step.

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.

I had a boyfriend in graduate school who would periodically work himself into the ground. When we talked about it, he would say that he only had to work this hard until he got a tenure-track job, and then he could relax.

Even then, years before I left, a cynical voice in my head would say, yeah right. And then it’ll be until you get tenure. And then it’ll be until you make full. And then you’ll have no idea what to do with yourself.

He wasn’t working himself into the ground because it really was necessary in order for him to get a tenure track job, although I’m sure he believed this. He was working himself into the ground because he was profoundly anxious about the process.

Moving the goalposts

I pick on my ex only because it was such a blatant example of what I’m talking about. We all do this all the time.

I’ll be happy when X happens. I’ll take time off when Y happens. I can’t do Z until Q.

We conditionalize a lot of our behavior on things that may or may not be within our control. And that means we give over our happiness and our choices to a capricious world.

This is not an argument against working hard

There are times, sometimes sort and sometimes long, when there really is a meaningful relationship between behavior we don’t want to have long-term and a goal.

When you’ve got six weeks until the deadline to turn in the dissertation, maybe you are working 18 hours days. But as soon as that diss is turned in, you’re not going to keep working 18 hours days, because it was about a concrete goal.

But there’s a difference between a concrete goal and a moving target.

Success in sheep’s clothing

A tenure-track job may seem to be just like the dissertation deadline – something concrete you can point to. But there are two fundamental differences.

First, the dissertation deadline is (for the most part) within your control. You can work more or less, you can ask for more or less help, you can plan or not plan. It’s not easy, but meeting it, barring serious and unforeseen circumstances, is something you can actually accomplish.

The tenure-track job, on the other hand, is subject to dozens of difference institutional, generational, and locational forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with you. There are thousands of bright, capable, utterly qualified people out there who do not have tenure-track jobs because there weren’t enough to go around.

Second, the dissertation deadline is clear-cut and tied to an end in itself. You finish the diss, and you graduate with a PhD. You may want to deploy the PhD into other things, but it is, itself, an end point.

The tenure-track job, or tenure, or the promotion to full – these are all usually markers of academic success rather than being ends in themselves. And that’s why the post moves every time we achieve one of these markers.

What’s your definition of success?

I’m going to generalize for a second: Academics, as a group, are deeply uncomfortable with success. Every time we achieve something that might count as success, we decide it doesn’t really count until we achieve the next thing that might count as success, which doesn’t really count until we achieve the next thing that might count as success. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s damn hard to feel good about the work you’re doing when success gets infinitely deferred into something still farther away.

So let me ask you this: What is your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve succeeded? What will deserve a celebration?

How much is that within your control?

This is the heart of the struggle

We didn’t just make this up out of whole cloth, every one of us. This deferral of success is built in to the fabric of the academic world.

This is a large part of why we feel like failures when we don’t move neatly through the milestones of success. This is a large part of why we feel like grad school was a waste of time unless we achieve full professor somewhere (we think of as) prestigious. This is a large part of why we can’t give ourselves credit for all of the amazing things we’ve already done, whether or not we go forward.

Look carefully at what counts as success. Be wary of being Charlie Brown to the academic football. It ends messy.

I want to talk about the ways that being female in the academy is complicated, the ways in which it still, despite all of our rhetoric to the contrary, matters.

I’m running up against my own internal, not-wholly-resolved, critic on this one, so let me say this at the outset.

There are lots of ways the academy is hard for different people, and lots of different “minority” identity positions get screwed in this system. (I put “minority” in quotes only because the people who are not marginalized in some way don’t actually constitute the numerical majority.)

I do not subscribe to any kind of Pain Olympics, in which only the experience or position that is the very most hardest counts. All of our pain and othering counts. All of it.

Okay? Okay.

Why I’m talking about this

Because academia relies on a narrative of merit, there is often a cultural assumption that academia is an equal playing field. And because of this, lots of smart, talented women have blamed themselves for the ways the system has undermined and devalued them.

And that shit has got to stop.

Despite all of our claims to post-feminism, the world – and that includes the academy – is still unequal. And blaming ourselves for that reality only makes it harder for us to identify it, respond to it, and find creative ways to call attention to it so it can be transformed.

So, to that end, I’m going to list all the ways I can think of that women experience inequality in the academy.

Let me count the ways

• Women, especially junior women, carry a disproportionate amount of service work in many departments, which jeopardizes their chances for tenure.
• Women in traditionally male fields (read: hard sciences) are often subjected to outright misogyny and abuse.
• Women are punished for their desire to have a family through family-unfriendly policies and practices, unlike their male partners, who are often seen more positively for their family commitments.
• Women have fewer mentorship opportunities.
• Women have a more difficult time projecting and owning authority in the classroom, which is often worsened by the responses of department chairs, deans, and other higher authority figures.
• Women are often perceived as threatening to the often-all-or-nearly-so-male “old guard.”
• Women who are cross-hired into Women’s Studies and their “home” department are often denied tenure because their feminist scholarship is denied credibility in the “home” department.
• Women who aren’t cross-hired are often denied tenure because their scholarship is considered “narrow” or “particular” because it doesn’t buy into the assumption that white men are universal and everyone else is “interested.”
• The fewer women there are in any given field, the more the existing women are called upon to mentor those behind them – leaving them less time to do the work they’re rewarded for.
• Women aren’t often taught how to negotiate, and for this reason among others, women are paid less well than men for the same work.
• Women are assumed to be less committed to their work if they have a baby.
• Women experience exclusion in graduate courses, in which they aren’t called on or in which their contributions aren’t considered equal.
• When women outshine their male peers, their achievements are dismissed as exceptions.
• Administrations are still, largely, male.

The important caveats

Now, not every woman will experience all of these. Departments and institutions vary, of course, and there are some that are doing their explicit best to address some of these issues.

But I’d argue that women in academia experience quite a few of them. Some will be obvious, and some will be the subtle kind that make you wonder if you’re crazy for thinking that gender inequality might be part of what’s going on.

If your gut says that gender inequality is part of what you’re experiencing, trust it. Trust that something bigger than you is at work. That doesn’t make it okay, but it means that it isn’t some fault of yours if you run afoul of the ways gender inequality plays itself out where you are. You are not the problem. A larger social and structural devaluing of women is.

What other ways have you seen or experienced women experience inequality in academia?