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Articles

No. 13 (2003 Spring)

The Price of Success: Senior Academic Women's Stress and Life Choices

  • Eugenia Proctor Gerdes
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21423/awlj-v13.a167
Submitted
June 19, 2017
Published
2017-06-12

Abstract

The fact that stress has a detrimental effect on health and well-being is well-documented, although the complex relationships are far from delineated. One major controversy involves whether women's traditional roles or the higher status professional and leadership positions, held predominantly by men, are more stressful for women. Although some argue that women will suffer more stress-related disorders as they move into high pressure jobs or as they combine work and family roles, the preponderance of data show that women are least healthy when they hold traditional family roles alone (see Barnett & Hyde, 2001). Even so, the same work environment can be more detrimental for women than for men if the expectations of that environment are structured more appropriately for men than for women (see Gerdes, 1995). Higher education is just such a traditionally male environment; and it is an important environment to examine because of the increasing presence of women as faculty and administrators, and because higher education itself is more than a venue for women's leadership and success. Institutions of higher learning prepare the men and women who become leaders across our society, and higher education arguably represents a society's highest potential for "preserving, transmitting and enlarging on what is best in the culture" (Farley, 1990, p. 194)