Most books about writing focus on the behaviors that individuals can adopt to increase the number of words they put on the page per day or per week. Reading about strategies such as writing a minimum number of words per day, every day, might lead you to believe that writing is simply accomplished by you getting your act together. But that’s not true.

Here’s what I’ve found through my own journey on the tenure track to full professor, along with coaching hundreds of academic womxn and nonbinary people to write and publish more: the key to understanding why it’s so hard to get your writing done is recognizing that the way the culture of academia is organized makes it hard for you. By feeling perpetually stressed out, by writing on nights and weekends because writing just does not fit into your workday, and by feeling guilty when you’re not writing and overwhelmed when you are, you are behaving exactly how the racist, ableist patriarchy wants you to (or, as bell hooks would call it, the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”).³ If you continue on this path at the stress levels you are currently experiencing, you will either break down or burn out.

And that is precisely how the culture of academia is structured for womxn, nonbinary people, and anyone who doesn’t “fit” into the stereotypical White male standard of the professorate.

Seeing how your individual struggles to write are connected to institutional and social structures is not blame-shifting. In fact, it is the only way to truly break out of the cycle of overwork and build a sustainable writing practice you actually enjoy. When you see how your individual actions support or disrupt the toxic, racist, sexist, ableist culture of academia, you make better everyday decisions, and you are more likely to make changes to your writing practices that really stick.

This book helps you see. It makes the connection between the culture of academia and your (in)ability to get writing done. Uncovering the connections between deeply ingrained cultural beliefs and the everyday choices we make when we sit down to write helps us make better choices—choices around writing that can be powerful acts of resistance. Imagine the power behind a professorate full of womxn and nonbinary people who can say “no” to projects that don’t move their careers forward, who have a thriving, positive relationship with their writing so that writing energizes them instead of causing them self-doubt. Imagine the power of womxn and nonbinary academics who are well-rested and have space to think, and how that simple (not easy, but simple) shift could change knowledge-making.

If you can quiet that nagging voice in your head that makes you think you can’t say “no,” that is driven by scarcity and fear, and step into your power by doing the work this book calls you to do, you will not only change your writing practice but also your life, your career, and your relationship to academia.

Don’t get me wrong: it is not your responsibility to change the culture of academia. Change to the structure of oppression absolutely must happen, but that sort of structural change is not the focus of this book. The kind of change I’m seeking to ignite is a change inside of you—a change that makes you happier, less stressed, and more prolific. I deeply believe that individual change has a ripple effect that will add up to a cultural shift, but hear this clearly: changing yourself and how you experience academia is enough. And that is also the mission of this book.

This book is for academic womxn and nonbinary people. As those words can mean different things to different people, I will briefly define what I mean.

I use “academic” to refer to graduate students, faculty members (part- or full-time, contingent or tenure track), and researchers. I’m choosing to use the term womxn to align with the work of intersectional feminists and signal the inclusion of Black, Indigenous, and people of color.⁴ I include nonbinary people to acknowledge that gender is a spectrum, and by only talking about “womxn” and “men,” I would be reinforcing a false (and patriarchal) binary. I use womxn “to recognize the agency of womxn, individually and collectively, and to challenge the notion that womxn are necessarily defined through their relation to men.”⁵ I’m aware that language is ever-changing and the spelling of womxn-with-an-x may mean something different in other contexts over time. I’m making the somewhat risky choice to go with that spelling anyway, standing on its origins and “herstory,” as I attempt to forge meaning.

Many of the stories and pieces of advice in this book connect the particular socialization of womxn in North American culture into the culture of academia. This is key to how I approach the mindset work and the day-to-day strategies laid out in this book. Because of this, I use the term womxn to include “anyone who has ever, ever will, or currently identifies as a womxn.”⁶ That is, I’m writing this book for every womxn in academia, socialized or identifying, and for all nonbinary academics. How your body and your gender identity are read by the institutions where you study and work affects the way you interact with those institutions, as does the socialization of womxn and nonbinary people in the racist, ableist patriarchy. Understanding the interaction of an individual with social structures is at the foundation of making time to write in academia but is rarely acknowledged or explained.

Institutions of higher education were not intended for womxn and nonbinary people. In the colonial United States, womxn were not legally allowed to attend college. By 1860, there were some institutions that granted degrees to White womxn, but they were limited to a subset of the degrees offered to White men. The idea that only certain programs of study were appropriate for womxn, African Americans, Native Americans, and other minoritized groups was predominant until as late as the 1970s.

Higher education’s role in reproducing social inequalities has long been clear and is accepted among many academics as a “sad but true” fact of life (often with a shoulder shrug). Tech companies invest in programs to solve the “pipeline problem,” referring to the paucity of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx graduates who are trained to start tech careers. Likewise, STEM education focuses on trying to increase the number of womxn in “hard sciences.” Campuses are becoming more and more racially and socioeconomically diverse, yet universities are slow to respond in a way that makes minoritized students feel welcome.⁷ The structure of academia actually replicates the “diversity problem.” Minoritized students’ interactions with mostly White, male professors will reinforce the idea that the university is not a place for them, and they may not pursue graduate degrees as a result. Fewer graduate students who are womxn, nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, or people of color lead to gender and race gaps in the professorate. According to catalyst.org, in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, the higher up the academic ladder you go, the wider the gender gap. In the United States, womxn are less likely than men to be granted tenure. Womxn of color are even more underrepresented in academia with Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native womxn totaling just 6 percent of full-time faculty—combined.⁸ By the time you look at the highest rank (with the highest paychecks)—full professors—womxn and minority groups are even more underrepresented.⁹

As if that’s not bad enough, across the board professors who are men earn more than womxn professors at all ranks. In fact, the gender wage gap in academia closely mirrors the gender wage gap across all professions, despite academia’s supposed liberal bent. Womxn in academia make 81.6 cents on the dollar to men (And, to be clear, this statistic is pretty much referring to White women and White men). Ten years ago, womxn made 80.8 cents on the dollar. But the total number of womxn in faculty positions grew by 24 percent in ten years, making womxn 44.8 percent of full-time faculty.¹⁰ These numbers lump together womxn of all races. The disparities for Black womxn, Indigenous womxn, and womxn of color are much greater.

As in many other aspects of society, womxn and nonbinary people have had to fight their way into male-dominated academic spaces. Once there, they are expected to conform to cultural norms that were created by and for men. For example, womxn are still told not to have children during their graduate studies and early careers. Advisors can push pregnant students out of programs by cutting or reducing funding, as Jessica Smartt Gullion recounted in her chapter of Mama, PhD.¹¹ If the “traditional” path through academia is understood as one where students are single during their graduate studies and delay (or avoid) caregiving responsibilities until after they have tenure, then the “traditional” path is leaving a lot of people out.

I have had three children during my time on the tenure track. When I came back from my first maternity leave, a senior male colleague pulled me aside after a faculty meeting to tell me that it was not fair that I got “vacation” and that he would also be able to write more if he could take so much time “off.” After baby number three, when I had become really good at controlling my pipeline and making time to write, a senior female colleague pulled me aside and asked if I had used my maternity leave to finish my book when, in fact, I had manipulated my pipeline so that my maternity leave fell in the window between the final submission of revised publications (In this case, they were two coedited volumes and a coauthored article in a top-tier journal.) and when they would officially be published. This was a very deliberate choice on my part because I wanted to be 100 percent focused on the baby during my maternity leave—not trying to polish almost-done projects while sleep-deprived. The result was that all those publications came out the semester I returned from maternity.

This, apparently, was unbelievable to my colleagues. But that’s because having a childbearing body is unbelievable in the academic context. To succeed, the culture of academia says you must act like a childless (or child-ignoring) male. Thus, the “traditional” path. Thus, the disbelief that anyone could develop systems and practices that would allow them to actually take time off for months to have a baby. Thus, pushing out pregnant and breastfeeding bodies. How could those bodies focus on scholarly work?

The very definition of how one goes about focusing on scholarly work is highly patriarchal. It’s racist, too. The hashtag #blackintheivory, created by Joy Melody Woods as she tweeted with Shardé M. Davis, shares horror stories of racist treatment in academia.¹² Entire organizations such as The Cite Black Women Collective were created to counteract the racist, patriarchal culture of academia that is structured to continually push Black and Indigenous people and people of color out in impactful ways, such as through citation politics.¹³ It is well-documented that student evaluations are biased against womxn, particularly against Black womxn. Since many of the founding institutions of higher education in the United States were literally built by enslaved people or the excess capital made possible by slavery, the fact that womxn, nonbinary, and BIPOC scholars face structural biases that make it less likely they’ll receive full professorship should come as no surprise. The pressure to compete inside of structures rigged to favor White men shapes the experiences of womxn and nonbinary people in academia.

Higher education believes it exists outside—actually, above—global economies. Of course, higher education is as entrenched in global fast capitalism as Microsoft and Facebook. Huge budget cuts to state institutions (e.g., University of Alaska, University of Illinois) and the beginning of the end of the tenure system (e.g., University of Wisconsin) are just two clues that higher education is severely affected by late-stage capitalism. This shows up most glaringly when we look at the changes in higher education’s workforce in the past fifteen years. The exploitation of contingent faculty, overproduction of graduate students entering flooded markets, and squeezing of every ounce of “productivity” out of faculty are all in line with what is happening in other industries.¹⁴ There are fewer staff members, meaning faculty must take on excess admin burden, but because of flooded markets, the performance of faculty in research, teaching, and service is expected to go up, and up, and up. Contingent faculty live paycheck to paycheck without the stability of a contract more than a few months long and are barely piecing together a fulltime income by teaching on multiple campuses.

The effects of late-stage capitalism on universities and colleges should not come as a surprise, since these institutions played a pivotal role in supporting early capitalism and European American colonialism “through their consolidation and propagation of racialized ideologies.”¹⁵ Early US institutions of higher education were built by the labor of enslaved people or with money from slaveholders and went on to propagate pseudoscientific “proof” to support racial inequalities. So, to say that academia played a role in ensuring that racial inequality is woven into the fabric of American life and economy would be putting it mildly.

Thinking about how to dismantle the structural inequalities inside academia, which are so deeply woven into economies and communities at every level, is absolutely overwhelming. But if we can tap on a crack in the foundation of it all, maybe we can bring the structure down, one individual at a time. That’s where writing comes in. Publishing is the capital of academia. To address the problem of womxn and nonbinary people, and especially womxn and nonbinary people of color, not getting equal representation in the professorate (particularly at the full professor level), we need to address their writing problem.

Womxn write less not because they have less to say but because they have less time to write than their male counterparts. An article in Inside Higher Ed reported that top journals saw submission by womxn tank during the COVID-19 lockdown.¹⁶ An open letter from Andrea R. Jain, editor of Journal of the American Academy of Religion, laments that “submissions by women dropped, although the number of submissions to the JAAR remained steady. I am not exaggerating when I say that almost all of the article submissions I have received in the time of the pandemic have come from men.¹⁷” Womxn were already taking on a greater service burden in their departments; they were also picking up the care burden dropped when schools closed during the pandemic.¹⁸ The COVID-19 global pandemic exacerbated existing problems within higher education. The consequences of universities intentionally designing themselves as cogs in the fast-capitali...