Elizabeth Liddy earned her Ph.D. while working a full-time job with three kids at home.  She was able to strike a balance, but not without struggle.

Her daughter Jennifer, whose husband died several years ago, is now a single mother with a young son that “happens to be quite brilliant.” He would like to take Spanish and Chinese courses outside of school, but Jennifer already struggles to drive him to private school each day.

“She’d like to get him more opportunities, but it’s like you don’t have that much time,” said Liddy, dean of the School of Information Studies. “How do you get him there when your day is already fully booked?”

Liddy and her daughter Jennifer’s stories are not uncommon in today’s world. Women now make up almost half of American workers and 40 percent of women with children at home are the sole breadwinners.

Statistics like these inspired U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “American Opportunity Agenda” — a five-point plan that cites paid family and medical leave, increased minimum wage, affordable and universal child care and equal pay for work as solutions to “ensure women workers have a fair shot at earning their financial security.” In turn, Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) hopes this will help strengthen middle class families.

“If you’re a single parent, it’s really tough, whether you’re male or female,” Liddy said. “If there are workplace issues, it’s a family issue.”

In her proposal, Gillibrand said the American family and the American workforce have been greatly shaped by the increased participation of women. She added that women are an integral part of a thriving middle class economy.

Because of this change, Liddy said she has made a point of being considerate and listening to mothers’ needs in the workplace, adding that her experience as a working mother has given her a greater sense of understanding. Providing nannies or having an area for children to play could help women better balance both their professional and family responsibilities, she said.

Liddy said she plans to create a university-wide day care facility for undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty members on the second floor of the iSchool. The room will allow women to nurse their babies, which is something Liddy said women can’t privately do anywhere on campus.

The facility also serves as another option for those who cannot get into the Early Education and Child Care Center, a day care facility for Syracuse University employees and students, which places many applicants on a waiting list.

Even if students or employees do get off the waiting list, the facility is also understaffed and overcrowded, Liddy said.

Students with children could also benefit from on-campus apartments specifically created to house families, said Sherri Williams, a member of the Women’s Leadership Initiative, an SU organization that works to increase dialogue between women across campus.

Williams, who is also a Ph.D. student at SU, said she talked to classmates with families who said they often live in off-campus housing, in areas such as Nob Hill, making it difficult for them to commute to campus and be close to day care centers.

These kinds of concerns, Williams said, are part of the reason that the Women’s Leadership Initiative was created.

“We wanted to be able to hear from people we don’t ordinarily hear from. People in professional organizations are voices you are going to hear all the time, but a commuter student who may be invested in the community isn’t one you would typically hear from,” Williams said.

Though she thinks Gillibrand’s plan is a step in the right direction, Williams said she believes it may be problematic to narrow it down to only strengthening the middle class. A woman in the middle class could have better access to resources than a woman in the lower class, she said, adding that some of the biggest impediments to getting out of poverty are transportation and childcare.

“I just feel like a lot of the time when we talk about women in the workplace, the issues are pretty much always put in the default category of a middle class woman,” she said.

Several of the plan’s provisions, including raising minimum wage and addressing pay equity, could help both working and upper-middle class women, said Harriet Brown, who is a professor at SU and also a member of the Women’s Leadership Initiative.

Attitudes toward women have changed and will continue to change, she said. In the 1990s, when it came to balancing work and family problems, Brown said it was “every family for itself.”

Plans such as Gillibrand’s, she said, will help propel the conversation forward.

“It’s in our economy’s best interest to support, rather than punish, working families,” Brown said.

But the image of the “typical” or “traditional” working family is still subject to gender stereotypes, said Allie Curtis, former Student Association president.

Fathers are still seen as the sole breadwinners and women are seen as the primary caregivers, she said, but this image is outdated.

“If we hope to advance as a society with women contributing as men always have, and if we hope to be a society in which glass ceilings for women are a thing of the past, we must update current policies to reflect the changing family culture in America,” Curtis said.

Though organizations like the Women’s Leadership Initiative exist to support women and the unique challenges they face in leadership, Curtis said women still deal with sexism, lack of confidence and inaccurate stereotypes in the workplace.

Through a female-faculty mentoring program, Liddy, the dean of the iSchool, said she hopes to create a network for women in the workforce to support each other.

“It is well-known that women, particularly faculty females, do not go for promotion at the same rate males do,” Liddy said. “And a lot of it is that they don’t have the time, but it’s also that they don’t have the confidence to put themselves forward.”

Early on in her career, Liddy said she remembers seeing this stereotype play out. When she was doing research in the 1990s, she said she started taking note of how many women and men there were at each meeting. The most frequent ratio, she said, was 97 men and three women. She said she often wonders, “How did the three of us move forward?”

Published on January 22, 2014 at 3:26 am

Contact Annie: apalme05@syr.edu