Having a child during grad school is especially hard on women

From ScienceMag:

It wasn’t the ending she wanted. After becoming a mother during the final year of her Ph.D., geographer Lauren Gifford finished her program with a deep-seated anger about the lack of support she received from her university as she navigated pregnancy, the aftereffects of a traumatic delivery, and child care. “It was just so hard in so many ways, and I feel like I finished the program out of spite,” says Gifford, now a senior adviser at the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown.

When walking became excruciating at 8 months pregnant, Gifford says she was denied a request for a complimentary campus parking permit. When she had to miss a semester as a teaching assistant because her due date fell in the middle of the term, the dean’s office chastised her for taking too much time off. And when she later signed up for 2 days per week of day care to finish writing her dissertation, it cost 110% of her stipend. “It was so demoralizing,” Gifford says.

Gifford is among the relative minority of researchers who have children during their Ph.D. According to a new study of more than 8000 researcher parents in 119 countries, only 21% of women and 27% of men started to have children during their Ph.D. program. And mothers face particular challenges when navigating parenthood while in graduate school, the study findings indicate.

It makes sense that graduate school would be a sensitive period, says Chaoqun Ni, associate professor of information science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study but has collaborated with members of the research team. “The Ph.D. stage is when people really … begin building the foundation of an academic career.” If major challenges arise during that time, she adds, it can have a snowball effect—affecting later stages such as postdoctoral opportunities and faculty hiring. “That is why stronger institutional support is important: Graduate students should not have to choose between having children and having a career.”

The study, published last month in Higher Education, was based on responses from a 2018 survey of parents who published at least one first- or last-authored paper between 2007 and ’16. The survey asked researchers about their family situation, including when they began to have children and how many children they had, as well as details about their educational and professional trajectory, such as when they finished their Ph.D. and where they were working. The research team then matched the survey responses with publication histories, coming up with a citation-based metric meant to represent the average scholarly impact of their papers. The resulting data set allowed the study authors to compare researchers who became parents at different ages and career stages, but did not include a comparison with authors who never had children.

The team found that an overlap between parenthood and graduate school affected both men and women. Researchers who started to have children before or during their Ph.D. program, for instance, were less likely to have graduated than their same-age but as-yet-childless peers, and for each additional child the probability fell further. But the delay hit mothers harder than fathers—so much so that men with three or more children were more likely to have graduated at any given age than mothers with two children.

The particular effects on younger women parents also became apparent through the citation scores. Men who went through graduate school in their 20s had roughly the same citation score regardless of when they had children. The same wasn’t true for their women peers: Citation scores for women who started to have children before the age of 30 were 14% lower than comparable men and 21% less than women who waited until their late 30s to start having children.

The study also found that regardless of the timing of having children, mothers in the data set were less likely to go on to hold academic positions than fathers. However, the survey did not ask respondents about career goals or how much their ultimate path may have deviated from their initial plans.

The way the authors have woven together personal family information with a wealth of data on a researcher’s eventual publication history and career is impressive, says Antonia Velicu, a sociologist and postdoc at the University of Zurich who has studied the obstacles academic parents face in their careers. It’s a “really cool study.”  

Author Xinyi Zhao, a computational social scientist and postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, hopes the results spur discussions about how to better support academic parents. She’s also quick to say she doesn’t want young researchers to see the results of her study as a blueprint for when to time parenthood. “The point isn’t that women should adapt further to academic timelines,” she says. “The point is that the timeline itself is the problem. If the career was structured for early parenthood—if it didn’t compound into permanent disadvantages—women wouldn’t need to make this choice in the first place.”

The reality, too, is that difficulties can arise when women elect to wait to have children—a scenario that can happen for many reasons, including professional goals, fertility, financial stability, and relationship status. “Early-career scientists may have a harder time finding that more permanent partner because of the requirement to get postdocs and potentially move several times,” says Jane Zelikova, the executive director of the Sustainability Research Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder and a co-founder of the group 500 Women Scientists, who began having children in her 40s after seven rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF)—a journey that was frustrating and expensive. “For many of us who are not financially stable or don’t come from money, you have to make tough choices—do I buy a house or do I do IVF?”

Institutional supports such as parental leave and affordable daycare can benefit anyone navigating the competing demands of parenthood and research. But in many family situations, women are the most in need of it because they shoulder more of the childcare burden. Their health is also more likely to be impacted by medical situations such as pregnancy complications, fertility treatments, C-sections, and postpartum depression.

“My brain changed because of everything that I went through,” says Lillian Rose Ostrach, a planetary scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who spoke to Science in her personal capacity as someone who went through an “8 year fertility gauntlet” starting in her postdoc years—including 11 rounds of IVF retrievals, seven pregnancy losses, surgical procedures, and surrogacy. “I was showing up the best I could to work, but … I [struggled to] have brain space to complete work, especially on longer timelines and write papers.”

One thing that’s been challenging for her is how to note gaps in productivity on her curriculum vitae (CV). “There’s no explanation possible professionally that is acceptable,” she says. “I didn’t stop working, so I don’t know how I would account for the gap, and it is one of the biggest anxieties and stressors that I have related to participating in proposals that require a biographical sketch, because that publication history matters.”

In Switzerland, Velicu says, the federal science funding agency changed the application process so that researchers no longer have to submit a CV. Instead, they provide a narrative list of their most meaningful contributions to science. Under this system, “you’re not put in this position that you have to argue why you took some time off of academia to be a mother or a father,” Velicu says.

For many parents, there’s no getting around the fact that there is going to be a period of interruption, “but there could be some ways of making it easier,” Ni says. “I think we just need better policy to support [parents], and also better evaluation mechanisms that would not penalize some sort of interrupted productivity.”

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