From Maggie Doherty, The Quiet Crisis of Parents on the Tenure Track:
The male academics I spoke to were highly involved parents who had used family leave to take care of children. While they appreciated that colleagues tended to be supportive of their decision to have kids — something a couple of them chalked up to gender privilege — some of them were frustrated that these same colleagues had assumed that they wouldn’t have any trouble balancing work and parenthood. Saul Zaritt, an assistant professor at Harvard with appointments in comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and civilizations, said that the message he got from older male colleagues who had been “particularly productive” on leave was that “it was easy to hold the baby and write the book.” But for Zaritt and other male academics who split child care evenly with their partners, it’s been far from easy. A child is “an enormous impediment to productivity,” said Parker, the assistant professor at Brown. The men I interviewed had many of the same worries about publishing and tenure as their female counterparts.