The Balancing Act: Gendered Perspectives in Faculty Roles and Work Lives. Susan Bracken, Jeanie Allen, and Diane Dean, eds. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006; illustrations; xiv+177pp; ISBN 1-57922-149-1; $24.95US (paper).
The Balancing Act is essential reading for anyone concerned with the uneven im pact of institutional policies and unofficial expectations on the lives of academic women and underrepresented minorities, male and female. It provides a body of quantitative and qualitative scholarship substantiating what many of us m ay already believe, but that can often be conveniently dismissed by university

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administrators. In one useful study, for exam ple, Neumann, Terosky and Schell turn their attention to mid-career faculty and find that “career dem ands do not lessen with tenure” but actually “increase” (91). In another, Jeni Hart studies the creative, far ranging policies initiated at the University of California that give the reader a sense of what is possible when university administrators take the needs of an increasing diverse faculty seriously. As with several other contributors to this volume, Hart argues that no one policy can achieve a sane work-life balance for persons at all career stages and in all personal contexts.
Despite the care contributors took in attending to the variety in academic institutions (research universities, comprehensive universities, and com m unity colleges, where faculty workloads are highest and least flexible), the studies deal exclusively with Am erican institutions. Here in Canada, the legal context for maternity and parental leaves is determined federally, and all employers including academic institutions have the same legal obligations to their employees (up to 12 months leave with a guarantee of returning to the same status of job). Junior faculty, however, still may be reluctant to take full advantage of those entitlem ents for fear of appearing insufficiently dedicated, as W olf-W endel and W ard’s contribution to the volume suggests - albeit in the American context. Canadian female faculty, like their Am erican counterparts, are not im m une to delaying childbearing/rearing or “choosing” to have fewer children than we might otherwise, as documented here by Mason, Goulden, and W olfinger.
Despite its m any strengths, The Balancing Act pays scant attention to the lives of adjunct or part-tim e faculty and the policies that inform their work-life “balance.” Although the editors and several contributors make passing reference to the changing institutional conditions that include the ever-increasing “casualization” of academic labour and the hiring of more and more non-tenure-stream faculty, none of the essays takes that body of academic workers as its focus.

Rachel W arburton Lakehead University