“My Wife Says…”: Epistemic Injustice in the Rationale of Parenting Responsibilities Among Academic Parents

ABSTRACT The event of having a child for an academic is associated with lower research productivity for women, even when the parenting burden is shared by both male and female parents. Universities and research organizations commonly employ “family‐friendly” policies to simultaneously ease work expectations and provide flexibility in work patterns, performance, and participation. Recent trends of fathers taking more responsibility for parenting engagement than past generations have challenged universities to adopt a greater diversity of family‐friendly policy approaches to ensure maximum workforce participation. However, such policies have done little to ameliorate that increased harm on academic careers, especially women's. Using a global survey of 10,445 academic parents, this study analyzes 5903 free‐text, qualitative responses to explore individualized rationales of how a parenting “unit” functions at the household level. By examining the gaps and silences in the testimonies of parents, this study concentrates on the gendered nature of parental rationales and the power imbalances and assumptions made around a partner's conceptualization of choice in parenting. The findings show that differing notions of parental workplace flexibility are used to reinforce gendered concepts of care at the household level. This undermines policy goals of helping parents in the workplace, especially if the policies are used to nudge mothers to disengage from work.