Academia’s parent trap: the struggles faced by researcher mothers

Adam Levy 00:00

Hello, I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers. In this episode: fertility and parenthood.

Academia can be incredibly, overwhelmingly, demanding.

Many feel that they have to dedicate all their time and energy to establishing and sustaining a successful career.

But many don’t want an all-encompassing career. And there are profound parts of life that can get pushed to the sidelines by these demands.

And of course, for many, this includes parenthood. Today, we’re going to speak with several researchers about the strain academia places on parents and those hoping to become parents.

And we’re going to start off with a discussion of fertility, a topic that remains taboo in many circles, including in academia.

Let me introduce you to biological anthropologist Alison Behie, head of the school of archeology and anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Alison Behie 01:14

I’m really interested in, sort of the evolutionary explanations for why humans behave the way they do, and why we see certain patterns in everything from reproduction to stress to disease.

Adam Levy 01:26

And we’ll find out shortly how Alison turned her work to questions of fertility and reproduction.

But first, we spoke about her journey within academia, within her family, and how the two impacted each other.

Alison Behie 01:42

As most academics do, I suppose, sort of focused on my career and my studies, and came to, sort of always wanted to be a mom, but that came a bit later on. First child very easy.

And then as I was approaching 40, wanting to have a second child, not so easy.

You know, tried naturally for a very long time, then sought advice from fertility doctors, and it took multiple rounds of IVF that then, you know, included miscarriage and failed cycles over probably two years before I was able to conceive my son.

Adam Levy 02:17

And over this two-year period, what was the impact, the toll on you personally?

Alison Behie 02:23

Oh, it’s such a terrible toll. It’s something you want so bad, and you feel a little bit, a little bit guilty, because you prioritized your career early on, without that understanding that your fertility drops off very rapidly.

And I think that’s not a way anyone should ever feel. I think feeling that you want to prioritize yourself and your goals and your dreams should not be something you’re made to feel guilty about.

But I think that was the primary feeling, was just this guilt that I had prioritized, yeah, trying to get where I was in my career, over my family.

Adam Levy 03:00

And were there, I suppose, external reasons for that guilt? Or was it purely a personal feeling, a sense of guilt for yourself and the family that you envisioned?

Alison Behie 03:09

It was largely personal. Putting that on myself, as many women do, we sort of just bear everything ourselves.

Part of it was that it was a very sort of secret journey. And I think it’s changing in academia now, which is wonderful, but I think at the time 8-10, years ago, it was something you didn’t talk about.

So I couldn’t share what was going on. I couldn’t come into work and be teary and be upset about it and be distracted. I just was, you know, supposed to be focused on what what I was doing. And I think that made it all the much worse.

Because I think when women talk about it and women say, “Oh, I’m really struggling to conceive,“ or “I’ve had a miscarriage,“ oh, there’s just women everywhere going, “Oh, me too. Me too That happened to me.“

And that is so beneficial for women going through it, to not feel so isolated, to not feel so alone, but at the time, that wasn’t the norm, and I think that really exacerbated the internal guilt that I was feeling.

Adam Levy 04:12

So for you at the time, were you just completely silent about it at work, trying to keep this very personal topic completely separate from your professional environment?

Alison Behie 04:23

Mostly, I was. I mean, I was very lucky, I think, to have both of my direct supervisors were women. Both had children, and so I did speak to them, and they were very supportive.

But then there were questions from other colleagues about, “Well, why didn’t you go to that conference?” and “Why aren’t you going on fieldwork?”

And it was very difficult for me to answer those honestly. And I felt like if I did answer those honestly, it made those colleagues very uncomfortable.

Adam Levy 04:51

Now, of course, academia is really high pressure. There are lots of demands on our time, on our energy.

I mean, you mentioned, you know, travel to conferences and things like that there.

Were there ways this two-year process felt, I suppose, incompatible with the demands of academia?

Alison Behie 05:08

Oh, I think absolutely. And I think for me particularly, it was the same time of the Zika crisis.

So even if I could travel in between IVF rounds, I couldn’t travel because they wouldn’t do IVF if you’d been in a zone where there was the Zika virus outbreak.

So it was having to think about, “how do I weigh those things out?”

And that, I guess, weighed on the guilt.

Going, “okay, well, if I prioritize this and it doesn’t work and my career gets set back, how is that going to feel?”

And that’s a really difficult conversation to have.

Adam Levy 05:45

Now, you’ve mentioned that your research actually relates a little bit to some of these issues. Was that something that was already the case before you went through this whole process?

Alison Behie 05:56

A little bit, yeah.

So I started working with non-human primates, but one of the things that came out of that was changes in reproduction when a species is faced with a severe environmental change, and I started to wonder about what that might look like in humans.

So just out of curiosity, sort of moved into this space in humans, looking at the impact of natural disasters on reproductive outcomes in humans.

But once I had my daughter, and then once I was going through this, I started to think more and more about that, and started to think more holistically about it, rather than just sort of the biological side.

But what are all the social things that impact the way that we reproduce and the decisions that we make around reproduction?

And I’ve since done interviews with women around just that.

Women that were pregnant during covid, women that were pregnant during the bushfire smoke in Canberra in 2019.

What is that stress during pregnancy, but what are the things that drive decisions around reproduction and the costs we’re willing to bear in order to have children?

Adam Levy 06:58

What does it mean to you personally to look at those kinds of questions in your work.

Alison Behie 07:02

I think it’s really important, because not only from a scientific perspective, I find it very, very interesting, but I think societally, it’s very important.

Because, you know, I think we have somewhat of a responsibility to think about these things and to understand we live in a world now where women are being asked to juggle career and child-rearing and taking care of the home and possibly elderly parents, and doing all of this in an environment where we aren’t necessarily given a lot of extra support.

So I think it’s really important that we understand the physiological toll and the emotional toll of that on women so that we can possibly do better to support them in the future,

Adam Levy 07:41

How did actually being a researcher, someone who’s used to digging around and getting to the bottom of the literature, how did that affect your experience with this journey?

Alison Behie 07:51

You think it would be helpful, and you think it would make you reasonable and rational.

But in my case, I think it led me down rabbit holes where, for example, I had a miscarriage at one point, and I was sort of looking for studies that were, before I had my results that confirmed that.

Just spent hours looking at studies where, “Oh, well, you know, in 10% of women, this symptom means something different.”

Well, you think it would be a blessing. It was a little bit of a curse, because I knew what kind of studies to look for, and it gave me a little bit of false hope in places.

And I think it also made me feel possibly more well-informed than I should in terms of understanding that I’m not a doctor in that way, I don’t understand a variety of all the intricacies in developing a fertility plan.

So I think I probably got bogged down a little bit too much in data and studies, versus just letting myself actually be the patient in this instance, and letting my care fall on someone that had a different expertise than I did.

Adam Levy 09:03

Now, you’ve spoken about how difficult it was to speak about these topics while you were going through this, but since then, well, I mean, you’re speaking to me today, you co-penned a piece for Nature a little while ago.

What does it mean to you to speak openly about these kinds of personal experiences that you’ve been through?

Alison Behie 09:24

I think it’s so important, because I think one of the things that was the hardest for me was that feeling of isolation, like, that I was going through this and no one else was going through this, and no one else had undergone this, and no one would undergo this.

And that’s just not true. We all go through really significant challenges. Men as well. But I think, you know women in particular.

And I think we’re kind of taught that when we look at successful women, that there’s this linear progression and that they haven’t had disruptions and they haven’t had ups and downs. And that’s just simply not true.

So I think it’s really important that we share the challenges that we had as women and how we dealt with them, and how we were able to cope and still be successful.

And I think that’s something that’s really been lacking to understand that you aren’t alone, that you know this woman that is now a professor, or that leads this, or that leads that, has been where you are, and they’ve come out the other side.

I think that is something that was really lacking at the time that I was going through my struggles.

Adam Levy 10:28

Has that, do you think, begun to change a little bit in the time since then?

Alison Behie 10:34

I think so. I think there are more women speaking out. You know, I think if you look across Instagram, you look across various social media platforms, I think women are coming out and sharing their journeys, doing way more than I’ve done, as in, sharing in real time. “This is what I’m going through. This is what’s happening today.”

They’re going through sharing their miscarriages, or their fertility struggles in real time with women.

And I think that’s very empowering for other women that are concerned about these things.

And it’s also shining a light on the fact that fertility issues are way more common than we ever were taught they were in terms of when I was younger.

Adam Levy 11:11

How would you like these changes to develop in the future? What would you like to see from academia to better support people who are going through fertility issues?

Alison Behie 11:21

I would just love to see a little bit more leniency and forgiveness around things like medical leave.

You know, I think a lot of institutions still have, (well, they’re doing a lot better than they were), fairly rigid policies around medical leave and needing certificates for things.

And I think that having a little bit more flexibility and understanding around what IVF actually does to a woman.

It’s not just about the baby at the other side. You know, you’re taking hormone injections every day that can make you feel extremely ill, that can completely change your hormonal profile, so you’re emotionally somewhat volatile.

And then at the other end, there isn’t necessarily going to be a baby to show for it, which somehow makes that worse.

But I think just more understanding around what that actually does, and more flexibility around being able to work that in as any other medical condition would be worked in, to workload plans, or professional development reviews, or anything like that.

Adam Levy 12:25

That was Alison Behie.

And Alison touched on the challenges academics can face when parenthood is something they hope for but that remains out of reach.

That’s something I also spoke to Wendy Dossett about.

Wendy’s a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Chester in the UK. And you may remember that we spoke in the episode describing alcohol dependence, and when we spoke, she also shared.

Wendy Dossett 12:52

If you want to thrive as a woman in academia, it’s infinitely easier to be childless, and obviously there’s a lot of child-free women in academia who are consciously prioritizing a career over having children.

I think it’s extremely difficult to be a parent, and especially a mother in academia.

I think I suffered a bit from the assumption that I must be a child-free career woman, when, in truth, I was a broken-hearted, childless woman.

I was kind of hanging on in academia by my fingernails at that point.

Adam Levy 13:34

Wendy Dossett there.

As we’ve learned so much of the discussion around parenthood and fertility can neglect the profound, emotional and practical realities.

And so I wanted to spend a section of this episode breaking down some of what we know.

I spoke with Karen Jones of the Institute of Education at the University of Reading in the UK.

Karen Jones 13:56

I’m interested in women’s careers and gender inequalities, particularly, but not exclusively, within higher education.

Adam Levy 14:05

The thing is, conversations around parenthood are taking place within academia.

So we started off by discussing the gaps between these conversations and the reality that many face.

Karen Jones 14:17

I think it’s talked about as if it’s just something that happens in the private sphere of people’s lives.

And although institutions have their family friendly policies and their equality diversity and inclusion policies, the reality of having a family for many parents is very different to what they expect it to be based on what they read in all these, you know, these lovely, sort of glossy policies and stories that they hear.

Adam Levy 14:49

Well, let’s dive into that reality a little bit. And yeah, of course, the reality of academia is that a lot of people struggle a lot with job security regardless of parenthood within academia.

Now throwing parenthood into the mix, how does having a child affect this?

Karen Jones 15:08

Yeah, it’s really challenging. So one of the unfortunate things really is that the early career stage is often a stage where people are employed on temporary contracts, and this can be for a very prolonged period these days.

So, you know, it’s not uncommon for people to be employed on one temporary contract after another for possibly several years.

And this often coincides with the age at which people are making decisions about having a family.

One of the difficulties here is that, not only is that sort of from a personal level, very challenging, because you have to decide, “Well, am I going to have a child now because my employment isn’t very secure?” But also in terms of maternity and paternity rights. Those aren’t very secure either.

For example, most employer maternity schemes will have clauses in them where people have to be employed for a certain period of time to be eligible.

And they also have to return to work for a period of time after taking the maternity leave to be eligible for that benefit.

So if you’re on a temporary contract, there’s a possibility that your contract will end during the maternity period, so therefore you cannot fulfill the eligibility criteria, which requires you to sort of return to work for another six months afterwards.

Adam Levy 16:34

And is this something that we’re seeing disproportionately affecting the careers of mothers versus fathers?

Karen Jones 16:41

There’s more research on mothers. I think that’s important to remember.

So we do know much more about the impact of maternity policies on mothers.

But what that literature shows is that the enhanced maternity policies that employers produce often include eligibility criteria.

And to be eligible for the enhanced maternity benefits it’s very common for you to have had to have worked for that employer for a period of time prior to the pregnancy, and to be able to return to employment following the pregnancy for a period of time.

So many women, in particularly in the postdoctoral career phase, when they’re on temporary contracts, find themselves in this really difficult precarious situation.

So often this occurs alongside the decisions they’re making about whether or not to have a family. And these two events often collide.

Adam Levy 17:41

Now at any stage of an academic career, there’s this pressure to always do more.

You know, whether it’s publish more, take on more, teaching responsibility, whatever it may be.

How does this fit in with the demands of parenthood, or perhaps not fit in with the demands of parenthood?

Karen Jones 18:01

It doesn’t, it doesn’t fit in very well at all.

So one of the characteristics of the higher education sector are just not compatible with motherhood, particularly in those early stages of motherhood, which are renowned for women feeling exhausted, dealing with sleepless nights.

You know, the physical and the mental impact of having a young child.

One of the difficulties is that, especially during the early career stage, networks are often underdeveloped at that stage.

It’s really important for early career academics to be producing research outputs, (in other words, publications) and gaining grants. A lot of this work involves long periods of labour to produce outputs.

So taking any sort of a break, a period of time away from that work, is really difficult.

On top of that, the whole sort of culture within academia is such that there’s a real pressure to be productive, to be producing high ranking journal articles, to be gaining grant capture, etc.

And there is just so much pressure to produce outputs that this leaves women, and men as well, but women in particular, in a really, really tricky situation.

Adam Levy 19:19

How do we see that impacting the long-term careers of mothers and fathers within academia?

Karen Jones 19:26

Well, there’s a lot of research showing that when women have a child they’re more likely to go through cycles of either returning to work on a part-time basis or not returning at all. And the likelihood of this increases with each child.

So, for example, they may return after the first child, but after the second child go part-time, or possibly take quite an extended period of leave.

And within academia, it’s extremely difficult to reintegrate yourself back into a career once you had had a period away, and this is much more likely to be the case for women than it is for men.

That’s not to say that men don’t take career breaks to look after children. Of course, some do, but the bulk of the childcare and child rearing does still fall on women, and there’s lots of research to show that.

Adam Levy 20:20

I’m wondering if you could share any stories, any accounts of of parents that you know within academia, that you’ve encountered during your research that really illustrate just how challenging it can be to take this academic and parenthood journey in parallel?

Karen Jones 20:38

The research I’ve conducted on maternity leave experiences in academia has been really interesting. So that study involved 553 women, 82% of them were in the UK.

The rest were sort of spread internationally, across many different countries.

But what I found uniformly was that they experienced extreme pressure to continue to work through their maternity leave period.

So overall, 69% of them actually continued to undertake core academic duties while they were on maternity leave.

So they were effectively relinquishing their maternity rights by doing that, and when I say core academic work, they were doing things like answering email, even supervising doctoral students and teaching.

A very large proportion chose to write publications, or write grant applications during that period.

There were a few that refer to this as being something they did because they loved their job and they wanted to remain active. But the vast majority said that they did this because they just felt they had to. It was not through choice.

This was mostly because they feared for their careers. Several referred to career death. And I just think it’s, it’s so shocking in this day and age that we’re hearing that term used, you know, career death. I mean, goodness.

This was exacerbated by precarious contracts in some cases, but not always. So some of these women were on secure contracts, but they still felt this immense pressure to be producing outputs.

One of the really interesting things that I came across in my data was they often compared themselves to colleagues who had no children, and they felt that they were at a disadvantage because they had a child or they were about to have a child.

It’s a really, really challenging sector to be working in when you’re having a young family. Very, very challenging.

Adam Levy 22:52

Now, we started off our conversation by really emphasizing the disparity between, you know, the ideal that universities might put forward for how one can have a family and still work within academia, and the reality.

Are there conversations underway to try and make the reality closer to that ideal, or to at least recognize a lot of the issues that we’re talking about here?

Karen Jones 23:19

I think there are conversations occurring around equality issues, equality, diversity and inclusion.

But it tends to be within certain areas of the institution, and I think that we need to have wider discussions across all areas of the institution.

For example, you know, I’m very involved in equality, diversity and inclusion issues, but it tends to fall on the same old people to be having those conversations.

What came out in my research is that line managers have a really important role to play in supporting parents taking maternity or paternity leave. But you know, it’s very ad hoc the way that they respond to this.

Women in particular, reported that they felt that they had experienced punitive measures because of taking maternity leave. And they reported this whether they’d continue to work through their leave or not.

They just felt that they weren’t supported in the same way, they weren’t championed anymore, that they weren’t seen as being career-orientated. And often this arose because of comments that they received from line managers or from other colleagues.

So while the conversations may be happening in the policy areas of academia, HR, departments, policy makers and those with a really keen interest in quality, diversity and inclusion, we need to have wider conversations, and we need much more work to be done with heads of school, within institutions and line managers, especially. Because they have a really critical role to play.

Adam Levy 25:00

Could you give a little sense of what that work might actually look like? What in your mind, the best practice would be then, so that we’re not facing these kinds of issues in academia to the extent that we currently are?

Karen Jones 25:13

Oh, there are lots of things Adam that I’d like to see.

So first of all, I’d like to see something like a returner scheme for people who’ve taken a period of maternity leave, and for men who’ve taken a longer period of paternity leave as well.

So the women and people who take a career break to have a child or to look after their children don’t feel this immense pressure to continue working through that period.

I’d also like to see much more training, really good quality training for line managers, so that they really do understand their legal obligations as well as the sort of ethical responsibilities they share, to new mothers.

There are also some really quite frightening statistics, which I think would possibly give line managers a bit of a wake-up call, you know, around the risks that women in particular face having just had a child, and how important it is to look after their wellbeing, to support them.

I mean, one really scary figure is the rate of maternal death in the UK has risen by 15% in 10 years.

Suicide is the leading cause of direct maternal death between six weeks and 12 months after the birth of a child. And that accounts for a staggering 39% of deaths in that period.

So, you know, it’s so important to recognize that women who’ve had a child are going through a significant sort of critical life event. You know, it’s physically, it takes a huge toll physically.

There can be all sorts of complications during the pregnancy. There can be complications during the birth and following the birth as well, both of the mother or the and/or the child.

And it’s also important to note that when we talk about women, to think about intersectionality and to think about the differences that occur for ethnic minority groups, because those figures are much more pronounced for women from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds.

So when we’re talking about maternity leave, you know, it’s so easy to think of it as, “Oh, they’ve had a baby. It’s just a bit of time off, enjoy your baby.”

You know, that’s the sort of phrase we hear quite often.

But, you know, digging a bit deeper, there are real physical and mental health concerns that we really need to be mindful of. And it’s so important that I think that needs to be cut across to line managers, to institutions, and they really need to take it very seriously with the support that they’re giving to new parents.

Adam Levy 28:00

That was Karen Jones.

Karen touched on the disproportionate burden that mothers often face when trying to balance family with an academic career. But she also mentioned the challenges that male researchers can face.

This is a topic I also spoke with Elaine Howard Ecklund about, who we heard from in an early episode discussing religion and research. She co authored a book titled Failing Families, Failing Science, in which she investigated the challenges of balancing academic pressures with family goals.

Elaine Howard Ecklund 28:33

And we found in our research that this is particularly difficult for young men in science. So I think still that women who go into high-level academic science are pretty aware that they can’t have it all, sadly, but they have a kind of sober mindset.

Men who go into academic science, especially young men, feel like they can have it all.

They want children. We wrote an article in PLOS ONE, a scientific journal called Men in Science Want More Children.

And I was amazed by this research that actually young men in science feel like they have fewer children than they would want because of the scientific career.

And some leave science because of that reason, because men in science want very much to have children, to have a robust family life and to spend time with their children, and so it’s a disappointment to them that science takes up so much of their lives.

Adam Levy 29:32

And what academia takes from our lives, and how this affects our choices, can have profound impact on our decisions to pursue careers in academia in the first place.

Here’s Ashley Ruba, who’s currently a UX researcher at Meta.

Ashley Ruba 29:48

When I was considering being a faculty member, that was something that was weighing very heavily on me, is like, “When would I have kids?”

And I saw this impact several other faculty who are in my department, who, you know, waited until after they had tenure and then were having pregnancy complications.

And it’s just really not ideal. And it is something that weighed very heavily on me, potentially, like also influenced my decision to leave, because it just didn’t seem like I could do both at the same time.

Adam Levy 30:17

And we’ll hear more from Ashley in next week’s episode, which will focus on a topic that gets right to the heart of many of the taboo challenges in academia: the decision to leave.

Until then, this has been Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers. Thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.