Married female scientists with children face many challenges

November 17, 2009 by Shawn Douglas  
Filed under: News

F-It!

 Email This Post

 

Leave a comment

Married female scientists with children are less likely to get tenure, and maternity leave is spotty at the university level according to a new study.

A new study released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) highlights the difficulties that female scientists and researchers have in the scientific community when it comes to raising a family.

The study, conducted in partnership with the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, focused on 25,000 graduate students and postdoctorates at the University of California. After tallying the results of surveys given to the group, researchers found that married women with children were nearly 35 percent less likely to receive tenure compared to married men with children. When compared to single women without children, women who were married with children had a 33 percent less chance of gaining tenure.

The group also found that paid maternity leave was tough to come by in the university environment. Almost 58 percent of universities were found to offer faculty six-weeks of paid maternity leave without limitations. However, only 13 percent of research universities offered that same level of benefits to graduate students and academic researchers. Paid parental leave was found to be almost non-existent.

The research highlights what many officials at universities already know; support for scientists who want to start a family is limited.

Although universities have tried to better their family planning policies, “there is a huge variation” in how the policies are enacted, said Mary Ann Mason, co-author of the CAP report, at a press conference last week. Mason claimed that frequently the researchers “don’t know” the details of the policies, and often scientists in the early part of their career don’t even qualify.

The magazine The Scientist found that many women expressing their opinion about the research confirmed that their lives in the lab changed once they began planning for a family. “If a lab is essentially thought of as a small business, the loss of an employee—even for a short period of time—can be devastating,” said Edyta Zielinska for The Scientist.

Many research participants said that the rigors of academic research added additional pressure in the search for balance between family life and career.

“The time pressures of academia are unrelenting for most faculty in the sciences, who work on average about 50 hours a week up through age 62,” stated the authors of the report.

“When combined with caregiving hours and house work, UC women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (—compared to 86 hours for men with children). And women faculty with children provide an average of more than 30 hours a week of caregiving up through age 50, while family responsive policies rarely address this long-term career-life issue.”

The report makes a number of recommendations to better the situation including the removal of some time-based barriers surrounding tenure review and better coordinated efforts by those bodies that provide funds to universities and academic research.

“Our current inadequate family responsive benefits for America’s researchers makes no economic sense,” said the study authors. “In the world of federal grants individuals who drop out of science after years of training represent a huge economic loss and are a detriment to our nation’s future excellence.”

Welcome back! If you love Baby Chums, please subscribe to our RSS feed.
Thanks for dropping by and enjoy!

Baby Buggies that face forward are, “Traumatic” for children
A study suggests that baby buggies which face forward could...

Scientists reject theory of ‘baby brain’ during pregnancy
[caption id="attachment_8747" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Kate Winslet & Myleene Klass...

Smoking during pregnancy linked to behavioral problems in children
Smoking during pregnancy may significantly increase the risk of behavioral...