She nursed her babies in the office, traveled with them, even set up a nursery down the hall from her department office. That's a luxury most small-college scientists don't have. The stakes are higher for Ms. Richmond. But scientists at small colleges have to publish, too, she says, and come tenure time, their records are sometimes compared with those of their colleagues at research universities. Ms. Richmond can attest to that.
Some women say they have paid the price.
There was a notoriously ugly tenure dispute in biology at Vassar College, and one in chemistry at Smith College. Both involved women who had tried to slow down the tenure clock because of children. Vassar won the case, and the lawsuit against Smith was dropped. But other things are important, too. Eight years ago, Lori Bettison-Varga passed up a job at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington to work at the College of Wooster, where she is now a tenured associate professor of geology and the mother of three children, two of them born before she got tenure.