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

Abstract

The fact that stress has a detrimental effect on health and well-being is welldocumented,although the complex relationships are far from delineated. Onemajor controversy involves whether women's traditional roles or the higher statusprofessional and leadership positions, held predominantly by men, are morestressful for women. Although some argue that women will suffer more stressrelateddisorders as they move into high pressure jobs or as they combine workand family roles, the preponderance of data show that women are least healthywhen 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 theexpectations of that environment are structured more appropriately for men thanfor women (see Gerdes, 1995). Higher education is just such a traditionally maleenvironment; and it is an important environment to examine because of theincreasing presence of women as faculty and administrators, and because highereducation itself is more than a venue for women's leadership and success.Institutions of higher learning prepare the men and women who become leadersacross our society, and higher education arguably represents a society's highestpotential for "preserving, transmitting and enlarging on what is best in the culture"(Farley, 1990, p. 194)