Is Motherhood the Biggest Reason for Academia's Gender Imbalance?

In the case of university employees, there are human rights protections preventing requiring more than an 8 hour day. Why are post-docs and research employees not protected? It should be one of the jobs of funding agencies to maintain human rights standards for those paid on their funds.

Thank you for publishing this- no easy solutions, or at least no "one size fits all" solutions. But examples from across the globe may help people- and institutions- find ways to address this problem.

Many people ask me what its like for women scientists in India. After training in the US (PhD and postdoc) I returned to India for a faculty position and had two kids. I wrote the blogs in (links below) for the www.indiabioscience.org website, an information portal and interaction forum for people who are considering moving back home. ...."Scientist and Mommy" http://www.indiabioscience.org/article/shubha-tole ...."One possible plug for the leaky pipeline" http://www.indiabioscience.org/node/327

....Excerpts from Scientist and Mommy (Oct 2009)

(opening para): At one point I thought of myself as a scientist who also happened to be a woman. At the end of four long-gestation projects that ran crazily overlapping with each other, two resulting in boys now aged 4 and 7, and the other two resulting in publications in Science and Nature Neuroscience, it’s very clear that I've traveled a road only “women scientists” get to navigate.…... This story will highlight the many facets of a uniquely Indian support system that made it possible for me to juggle the jobs of scientist and mommy, the bumpy road to setting up a lab in India, and a fundamental scientific discovery we were privileged to make together…….....

(closing para): After 10 years of joining TIFR, my husband and I we were each able to arrange sabbaticals at Stanford University…..we got to see first-hand how mommys and daddys in the US manage the scientist-and-parent jobs. Anyone who pulls this off in the US deserves a medal…no, two or three. My husband and I have had our most productive scientific years after returning to India, and had two children during these years… so I’ll end this story with a grateful acknowledgement of the wonderful support system we have, that draws from modern-day India’s many contrasting faces: a supportive Institution and colleagues, a fantastic child care center, and the two women who don’t get authorship on my papers, but who have nevertheless been an integral part of my success as a scientist, and to my being able to juggle mommydom and lab at the same time: my retired aunt Ushamavashi, and the determined and loyal Rajkumari, an illiterate but forward thinking mother who dreamed of sending her daughters to school.

So long as the only respected position in academia is being a PI, and so long as the only route to becoming a PI is to throw your entire personal life under the bus of workaholicism, this will be the result. Everything from hobbies to parenthood are nothing but albatrosses keeping people from becoming successful PIs. Many highly skilled men and women run the other way when they realize this. When it comes to parenthood, it's easy to make policies that allow women (and men) to produce children and still compete for tenure. It's really hard to make policies that allow women (and men) to actually spend time with their children. I suspect that women have a stronger desire to interact and spend time with their children than men do, and thus on average move away from academic careers more than men.

If we want to solve this problem, the entire academic system needs to be discarded and rebuilt from the ground up. And I do mean everything - ridiculously long and exploitative training periods with accompanying low salaries, absurdly low and hypercompetative grant funding, and the tenure and promotion system that forces everyone to either become a grant getting PI or labels them a failure. Nothing about this system is supportive for family life and band-aids like tenure extension for maternity leave aren't going to fix the problems.

I am a female postdoc, we are both researchers and we recently had a baby. I think the study has missed the main reason why women may drop out of science, which is the same reason why many women reach less frequently the top positions at work: paternity leave virtually does not exist. It is engrained in the society that when a family welcomes a baby, females should be the ones spending more time with the kids (it is 'the normal thing'). In our modern times, females, like males, want to spend time with their babies but males are not given the opportunity while females are. I worked until the day before delivery because I like to go to work and I was lucky to be able to do that. After the birth of our baby I was offered to switch to part-time on my contract(which I did not do) while nobody questioned the fact that my husband would continue full-time. After delivery, you might physically need from few days to few weeks to recover so it is fair to give a few weeks of leave to mothers. But why are the fathers not given the opportunity to take care of their babies? The hard work starts directly after the birth, and by not giving paternity leave (5 or 10 days is a joke), it is assumed by the society that the mother will do the whole baby job. Here is news: there are many other things than breastfeeding your baby that the father can do. In our case, we ignored this non-sense and shared time off from the birth to two months after the birth when she started daycare. But we could only do that because working hours in research are very flexible if you are organized. We could not have done that if we would have had any other job where you have to be present in the office at a certain time of the day. Our baby is now 9 months old and our productivity has almost not suffered (for both of us). And what if it had anyway? We are not robots...I believe that if fathers were given the opportunity to take paternity leave (not only in science but everywhere), more and more fathers would take it (it would become 'the normal thing'). If fathers can have paternity leave that are virtually as long as maternity leave, then there would not be any discrimination during hiring because male and female would bear the same 'risk' of being less productive at work at a certain time of their careers. Fathers are not given the choice, which means that mothers are not either, in most cases.

Hang on, though. Tenure vs. motherhood is something *ALL* academics face, whether in STEM fields or in the humanities, social sciences, business, education, etc. Why would becoming a mother be *MORE* of an obstacle to women in STEM than, say, women seeking tenure in the humanities or social sciences? Why is it so much "easier" to be a female literature professor than a female physics professor?

Nice article! I will add that many women in the U.S. are still completing their doctoral training when other women begin their childbearing years. Because these women are not classified as employees, they do not even have a legal right to maternity leave, never mind dependent health insurance or adequate funds for daycare.

I hope this work focuses more attention on this kind of concrete barrier to success.

I actually agree with the authors, motherhood is a barrier to women in academia in science. I am a long-term post-doc and 37 years old. I have done 2 post-docs and had 2 children during my post-doc years. Having children has definitely slowed down my career process. Additionally, I find the idea of a stressful academic career, struggling to get funding and working long hours to be very offputting becuase I want to be able to go home at a reasonable time and take care of my children. I have realized that while I would enjoy a challenging career in science research, I did not have children to have other people completely raise them. Thus, I am currently on the job hunt for something that would not require long hours during the week and weekend work, ha - wish me luck on that!

This study comes close to the point. Not only is motherhood itself a challenge, but the potential to have kids puts many women at risk early in their careers. Search committees may shy away from hiring competent younger women because they foresee the responsibilities of motherhood that could make a colleague less "productive" in the early stages of their careers (despite the fact that this illegal to consider). The flip side is that giving special circumstances (like the part-time option with a longer tenure clock, which sounds fantastic) will probably be seen as an "easier" way, and less valued, just as the other areas that women enter, such as predominately undergraduate institutions with less pressure for publications.

“That's crazy. Men don't have to do that. It's this societal-designed unfairness that's rooted in biology.”

Actually, if the authors think about this for a second it is clearly wrong: roughly equal numbers of men to women have children during the tenure-track process. The problem is not having a child, the problem is that men do not do 50% of the work when having a child. If men and women each did 50% of the work when having a child (as occurs in some relationships), then each would have the same career setback, and having a child would have no gender-specific effects).

http://www.adrianliston.eu/blog/2009/11/20/science-is-not-a-family-frien...