"Time Anxiety" Of Female Professors In Colleges And Universities

Time anxiety is a common collective syndrome in modern people.It is not only an individual’s subjective understanding of the world but also reflects the subject’s judgment and reflection on the meaning of life and the value of time.It guides self-development in the past,present,and future forms of time.Higher education and educators alike suffer from time anxiety.The feminization of higher education has accelerated the number of female professors.In this context,this group leads disciplinary development and academic innovation at a high professional level,and vigorously promotes the process of higher education and social modernization.To deeply understand the spiritual life,dynamic value,career development,and social practice of female professors,time anxiety provides an effective perspective.In this research,female professors were selected as the research objects,and in-depth interviews were used to explore the time anxiety of female professors.Based on the internal intuitive experience and subjective narrative of female professors,this study finds that female professors have the following problems in different degrees on the mental level: due to the rapid passage of time and excessive labor,time disorder is brought about;Uncertainty leads to time conflicts,time management failures,which lead to time anxiety such as hurry,worry,tension,and burnout.On the one hand,female professors’ time anxiety projected some observable external characteristics,such as actions.On the other hand,it also points to the individual’s subjective perception and even unconscious inner expression.The common characteristics can be summarized as the following four points:(1)Influenced by the order of working hours,it causes personal frustration and tension.(2)Some flexible and mobile time is reserved for working hours in advance,to maintain a "war state" of being on call psychologically.(3)The high synchronization of the pace of life and working time leads to the lack of personal leisure time.(4)Work is affected by the company of children,resulting in guilt and remorse.The group of female professors is a common group concept,and there are differences in school,discipline,age,and other factors within it.In addition,compared with male professors,female professors have a "disadvantage" in terms of time for "birth" and "child-rearing".Compared with other female teachers in higher education,they show a time "advantage" in symbolic capital.Female professors’ experience of personal time,its characteristics,formation,and change,reflects the concept of time that cannot be separated from the joint shaping of social structure and university organizational environment.Female professors can continuously influence the rule construction of their educational institutions through their practice consciousness,discourse consciousness,and even unconscious actions.Organizational culture as the medium gives new meaning to social time culture and gender culture.This study reviewed the occurrence mechanism and action process of time anxiety of female professors.Time anxiety of female professors is constantly formed and developed in the mutual nesting and interaction of external structure and individual action,which reflects the interaction of external structure and individual action on female professors.The structural forces of five elements of the two levels,including the macro-society and the meso-organization,constitute the reasons for the time anxiety of female professors.(1)The two modules of accelerating modernity and traditional gender culture,which are dominated by social structure,promote the time anxiety of female professors.In the macroscopic structure,"modernity" constitutes the most direct and important influencing factor in the time anxiety experience of female professors.(2)based on undertaking the macro-structure of society,university organizations can further aggregate into new energy through absorption,integration,and improvement.Times change again in the field of education,becoming a bond and bridge between female professors and the macro society.Through three elements,such as the operating mechanism of the organization,the evolution of the diversified identity of teachers,and the situational interaction pressure in the school field,the meso-level interaction with female professors is carried out,which directly shapes the time anxiety of female professors.Among the structural forces promoting time anxiety of female professors,meso-organizational structure exerts a greater influence,followed by macro-social structure.Specific to each sub-driving "engine",the organizational operation mechanism represented by the new public managerialism carried out at the meso-level is the most direct and strongest structural constraint to create female professors’ time anxiety.In contrast,other elements are flexible frameworks that are indirectly applied to some female professors.In addition to the influence of external structure,female professors adjust their time anxiety by exerting their subjective initiative and actively participating in the construction of the organization and society.At the same time,both the individual and the structure are developed constructively.(1)Take the macro-level time acceleration as the reference of their life rhythm,and actively adapt to the social time culture.(2)based on equal relationships,including within the family,efforts should be made to reshape gender culture at the macro level.(3)Driven by the need for self-realization,such as self-recognition and self-progress,to constantly surpass one’s previous achievements.(4)Take symbolic identity responsibility as the mission,and take the initiative to lead higher education organizations and other groups to make common progress.The female professors’ subjective cognition and practical actions to adjust time anxiety promote the transformation of depressed time anxiety into a holistic,harmonious,and healthy personality.To rebuild the internal chaos,we should clarify our mission as creative and constructive high-level talents again,generate and regulate our subjective practice,and participate in the development and improvement of the university’s organizational environment and the overall social order.Based on distinguishing the direction of interaction and the strength of interaction,four groups of forms in the interaction process of female professors’ time anxiety were identified.(1)The university’s organizational structure and female professors’ individual actions form a two-way reinforcement interaction result.(2)Social structure,organizational structure,and female professors show a bidirectional and circular relationship.(3)Modernity,university organizational structure,and female professors’ actions show a two-way and mutually reinforcing interactive relationship.(4)Among the interaction among female professors’ actions,university organizational structure,and traditional gender culture,traditional gender culture constitutes an important constraint condition for female professors’ time anxiety.However,on the other hand,individual actions and interactions with university organizations directly contribute to the deconstruction and reinterpretation of traditional gender culture.Finally,from the perspective of the regulation of individual subjective cognition and the improvement of structural elements,the following four suggestions are put forward to jointly alleviate the time anxiety of educators,including female professors.(1)Subjectively,take the value of time as the guide to rationally locate personal goals.(2)In terms of time culture,it advocates slow philosophy and improves teachers’ time control power.(3)In terms of gender culture,pay attention to the growth of women and promote gender equality.(4)At the level of organizational culture,reform the management system and create a benign education ecology.