I recently had the opportunity to participate in a presentation by the Loyola Women’s Center on “Balancing Work and Family,” a panel presentation in which several members of Loyola’s faculty and staff related their personal experiences of trying to find a happy balance between work and family.

The director of the Women’s Center, Susanne Dietzel, opened the panel by offering a discussion of some of the most common difficulties experienced by women in academia in their desires to produce both babies and publications.

With two kids under the age of five and several academic friends who have given up entirely on the prospect of children because they simply do not fit with the academic lifestyle, I fully expected that nothing Dr. Dietzel had to say would come as a surprise to me. My own experience of trying to have a life and a career had already jolted me out of any optimistic dream world I had been living in.

Over the past five years, I have been turned down for jobs because I was pregnant, defended my thesis on four hours of sleep with a colicky six-week-old at home, traveled to England to spend time researching in the archives with a two-month old and engaged in heated debate with a former dean (not at Loyola) about the inconveniences I had created for the university by getting pregnant.

I had really thought I heard the worst of it; that is, until Dr. Dietzel started telling us about the high number of women who, even though they were eminently qualified, were choosing not to go on to graduate school, because they wanted families and believed that it was impossible to balance a career and a family.

In the last five years of teaching, I have taught several brilliant women. A few of them have gone on to graduate school, and I know they have all asked me how I manage to balance work and family. Unfortunately, I have had no dazzling insight to pass on. I have simply told them that if you love your children, and you love your job, then you’ll make it work.

I now realize that I have been passing on the wrong advice. I should have been telling them, if they were worried that the university environment is not conducive to career women who also want families, then maybe they should be doing something about it now, so that things might actually improve before they get there.

Universities like Loyola across the United States generally comply with the Title VII Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which requires that employers treat pregnancy the same as any other temporary disability. This act obviously applies to those working outside academia as well and was apparently quite progressive for its time. Before this, companies did not have to give women any form of maternity leave.

Nevertheless, the very wording of this act tells us that it is time to effect a change in attitudes in this country.

How can pregnant women be taken seriously by their coworkers and employers when they are legally considered to be disabled? How is it possible that anyone can see pregnancy as a disability? I would like to think that we have come a long way since 1978, but the continued existence of this kind of legislation strongly suggests that we have not come far enough.

If students are worried about their own futures, about graduate school, or trying to balance work and family, isn’t this something they need to target for change? Isn’t this issue worth voicing an opinion about somehow?

And if the current president is as dedicated to “family values” as he claims to be, isn’t this the ideal time to start asking him to put his money where his mouth is and support families in America?

Many other governments across the world (in Australia, Sweden, Canada, for example) give up to a year in paid parental leave. In the United States, a woman is lucky to get eight weeks fully paid. No wonder women are discouraged by the very thought of trying to balance career and family.

Changing attitudes (and laws) about maternity leave is obviously just one very small part of the solution in trying to balance work and family and will not eliminate the many other obstacles career mothers are bound to encounter while raising their children (finding day care, absences due to sick children, homework inflation, to name a few).

But this small step is an important one and could help future women succeed in balancing work and family, whereas the best my generation can hope to do is juggle.

Sara Butler, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history.