Intersecting ethics of responsibility: Childless academic women and their ambivalence in reproductive decision-making

Neoliberalism has transformed both higher education and society generally; professors are to be self-sufficient, putting the university before everything else, while citizens must care for themselves, so the state does not have to. This creates a tension for academic women, who are least likely among highly educated professional women to have children - a tension between the essentialist imperative that all women embrace motherhood, and the academic imperative that faculty give the university their undivided attention. Drawing from interviews with Canadian academic women about their reproductive decision-making, this article uses Thematic Analysis to develop the concept of “responsible ambivalence” as a framework for understanding their childlessness. It shows how conflicting ethics of responsibility - to the self and to others - intersect and coexist within their accounts and inform the women's reproductive decision-making. In rejecting the ideology of maternal femininity, this article shows how the women's childlessness is consistent with the responsibilizing imperatives of neoliberal academic culture.