Balancing work and family

What conflicts between work life and home life do foreign-born faculty face in U.S. universities? Using data from the 2011 NSF-funded NETWISE II survey of tenured and tenure-track faculty in biology, biochemistry, civil engineering, and mathematics in over 500 U.S. research universities and other higher education institutions, new research overturns some preconceptions of the pressures of productive academic science careers—particularly for foriegn-born women. ASU School of Public Affairs CORD Graduate Student Fellow Luyu Du is lead author with Julia Melkers and CORD Fellow Mayra Morales Tirado (College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University) of the surprising findings, published this week in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

U.S.-born and foreign-born faculty surveyed by the team report similar levels of work-life conflict, but differences in family structure and time allocations at work may help to explain contrasts in how these conflicts are experienced. Read the article "Work–family conflict in academic science: Differential experiences of foreign-born and U.S.-born faculty" here (https://cord.asu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-04/Du_Tirado_Melkers_JDHE_2025.pdf)