One thing I've been thinking about lately is the idea of how difficult it is going to be to have children if I pursue a career in science. Clearly women do it. My roommate's PI at Oregon Health Science University has a daughter. At my school--which is a liberal arts school and not a hardcore research university to be fair--there is one woman chemistry prof who has two children and three women biology biology profs. Only one of the three women biology profs had a son, although one of the three is in her early 30s and just got on tenure track a couple years ago. (Tangentially, it's remarkable how few women faculty members there are in the sciences that is now that I write that out).
People write about how academia is notoriously difficult for women if they want to have a family because there is no good time to get pregnant. By the time you finish your PhD and post-doc, you're already in your early 30s and not in a position of job security. I've heard of people having kids while they are in graduate school, but usually men. My friend and his brother grew up as little kids on graduate stipends (he said his parents always felt guilty about being unable to provide for them well, but they felt like having macaroni and cheese for dinner every night was awesome--you don't notice when you're a little kid). But the thing is there's no way in hell it would be responsible to carry a fetus while doing lab work, especially in synthetic organic chemistry. I mean, I'm just thinking about the amount of chloroform I inhale while running a column, even when using the hood correctly. That means that you have to take, essentially, a whole year off of working if you want to have children. I'm not sure how other careers--like industry careers--are affected.
My mother was an environmental scientists and worked for the EPA when she had me and she basically worked throughout her pregnancy. She at one point did toxicology stuff and would go to the dump to take samples, but she did other office-based work as well that allowed her to do work that one can safely do while pregnant when she had me. After my brother was born she took time off and returned briefly when we got older, but stopped working again when we moved when my dad got another job. She's now an artist and works on Go Green Wilmette, the local environmental effort in the town we live in, a suburb of Chicago. She said that she sometimes feels guilty for not providing a better model for a working mother, and that we don't understand that the field she was working in was highly male-dominated and that she was one of very few women to work in environmental science in the '80s.
She said on the other hand, though, she didn't want us to be raised by nannies. If she was going to have children, she was going to do it right. I grew up in DC until we moved when I was ten, and there are plenty of families with two parents that had high powered jobs and I knew plenty of kids who saw more of and were more attached to their babysitters than their parents. I have a lot of respect for my mother, and I don't think her choice was a bad one or a weak one. I think that I was raised well, that my parents are intellectually curious people who instilled some of that curiosity in me, and that, although I don't agree with 100% of their parenting choices, they are a pretty good model for how I want to raise my children someday.
I'm at a stage in my life right now, unlike some of my friends, where I don't have a serious long-term relationship yet. A few of my friends are trying to coordinate post-graduation plans (whether it is grad school, Teach for America, or employment) and while enough of them manage to work it out, it seems to be a huge headache--especially for graduate school. One or the other person usually has to compromise or else they're doing long distance for 5 years, and I imagine it doesn't get any easier after that. One of my chemistry profs and his wife worked it out nicely where he works at Reed and she works at Portland State University and they have children and each have tenure. Two of my friends worked it out for REU programs last summer, but it was stressful and one of them had to compromise by going to a (very good but) less competitive program than the best one she got into. It gave them a serious taste of how it would be when they both applied for PhD programs...
More of the girls I know--even as an undergrads--are paranoid about planning their lives and their careers. We think about these consequences way more than our male peers, and we wonder about how taking a path that takes a lot of training--like getting a PhD--affects having a family. This is the main argument I see for jumping into grad school directly out of undergrad.
Edited to add: this New York Times article has some interesting statistics. Excerpt:
Surveying outcomes for 160,000 Ph.D. recipients across the United States, the researchers determined that 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children, compared with only 44 percent of their tenured female colleagues. Twelve years or more after receiving their doctorates, tenured women were more than twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced. And lest all of this look like “personal choice,” when the researchers asked 8,700 faculty members in the University of California system about family and work issues, nearly 40 percent of the women agreed with the statement, “I had fewer children than I wanted,” compared with less than 20 percent of the men. The take-home message, Dr. Mason said in a telephone interview, is, “Men can have it all, but women can’t.”Also, this article addresses the issue with some interesting data on it as well.
Posts
5 comments:
This is an intensely relevant thing in my life right now. (Well, as relevant as it can be without my actually being pregnant, anyway.) I still don't know what to think.
And I have to say--coordinating two academic jobs with a tight job market sounds way harder to me than coordinating our grad school to be together, for me and my husband, at least.
Yeah, I was thinking about you somewhat while writing this--so far you guys have managed it well, it seems.
I was also talking to roommate whose PI has two daughters and she and her husband both have PhDs and careers in academic science. She is a great role model, but she told my roommate that it definitely has affected her career and while she's happy she made the choice to have children, that means she's not pushing out Science and Nature papers all the time.
she also said that her PI had her oldest daughter during her last year of grad school, which is amazing to me.
I hope to have my first kid during the end of grad school, actually. We'll see how that goes. I'm sure I'll blog about it--probably more publicly/anonymously than usual, because both having kids as a lab science grad student and having kids as a chemist are interesting topics, and there's not many people out there talking about it.
I actually had a really interesting conversation with Alan about this topic--since both he and his wife are chemistry professors who made certain sacrifices both family and career to make things work.
Post a Comment