Some colleges are giving scientists who are mothers money to pay for day care or lab assistants
Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Eleanor G. Shore, a former dean of faculty affairs at the Harvard Medical School, about whether colleges should pay for help like day care or lab assistants for scientists who are mothers.
Elizabeth M. Petty had already earned tenure in internal medicine and human genetics three years ago when she and her partner adopted a baby boy from Guatemala.
Six months later, Dr. Petty learned that a 4-year-old boy from the same country also needed a home. She knew the situation wasn’t ideal -- adopting two children in one year while juggling her demanding research and clinical career at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But in adoption, parents take children when they are available, so Dr. Petty and her partner did.
What Dr. Petty did not anticipate was that her new family would almost derail her research. Her older son had difficulty adjusting to his new surroundings, and the professor spent hours consulting doctors and educators to deal with the repercussions of emotional abuse he had suffered in Guatemala.
“I was used to working around the clock before the kids,” she says. “But I couldn’t keep putting in the evening and weekend hours I needed to keep the research going. It kind of fell apart.”
Dr. Petty’s supervisors suggested she close her laboratory and devote herself to clinical work, counseling people with genetic conditions. But Dr. Petty, who was just beginning a new project on how cell development can lead to malignancy, was reluctant to throw away her 10-year research career.
Her challenge is one many scientists, especially females ones, face: keeping all the components of a busy academic career going while raising young kids. So Dr. Petty turned for help last year to a new program at Michigan that is supported in part by the National Science Foundation. The program gave her a $20,000 grant to pay a graduate student and a postdoctoral researcher to help jump-start her project.
“We did some new techniques and new experiments that we wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t had the money,” says Dr. Petty, who used the resulting data to apply for a $1.25-million federal grant. In June the National Institutes of Health gave it preliminary approval.
Women at Work
Michigan is one of a handful of major research universities that are trying to minimize the toll that raising small children can take on a female scientist’s career. Scientists, and medical professors in particular, face a heavy workload: painstaking laboratory experiments, clinical work, teaching, and writing grant proposals and journal articles.
Universities like Michigan are directing money right to the source of the problem by helping female scientists hire an extra set of hands in the lab or a substitute teacher in the classroom so they can spend more time at home without watching their careers stall. Harvard University, and the Universities of Maryland at Baltimore County, Washington, and Wisconsin at Madison offer similar grants. Michigan has even paid for weekend day care so that female scientists have quiet time to write grants and journal articles. And this summer, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases helped five postdoctoral students who are also mothers hire technicians to help with laboratory experiments.
“Some science requires you to be in the lab at whatever hour the thing you’re looking for is going to happen,” says Abigail J. Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at Michigan who administers the grant program there. “That might be 3 a.m. Or it might mean being in the field for six weeks, or traveling to a particular well you’re sampling in Utah.”
All of those can be nearly impossible for someone who is caring for young children, she says. “Family responsibilities cut into your ability to operate the way some science requires.”
Although academic women say the money is a signal that their institutions understand the burden of mixing a family with a demanding scientific career, others have questions. Can hiring short-term help in the lab do much good when the burden of caring for children goes on for years? Should universities really be encouraging professors and postdocs to spend less time in the lab, or paying their day-care bills? And won’t men and women who work hard but don’t have children grow resentful?
Elinor Burkett, who until this semester was chairwoman of the journalism department at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, says the new grants give money to upper-middle-class women who knew full well that managing children with a research career would be difficult. “Deciding to have children at a very critical time in your career is a decision. It’s a choice,” says Ms. Burkett, who wrote The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (2000).
“It’s not that I’m unsympathetic that people have very busy and very tight schedules, but I have a clear sense of obligation to helping those who are needy,” says Ms. Burkett, who has received a Fulbright Professorship to teach journalism next year at Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology. “These women are already privileged. Maybe we can afford to help them when all of the textile workers in the South have day care.”
Renewed Debate
Concern has been building for years over the low numbers of women who succeed in science and engineering at the country’s top research institutions. While women are earning an increasing proportion of Ph.D.'s in fields like biology, physics, and chemistry, they are making their way into science jobs at the country’s top research institutions in much smaller proportions.
The debate intensified in January after Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s president, told a meeting of scientists and engineers that perhaps the problem is that women lack the innate ability to succeed in science. But many academic women have said that the biggest barriers to their success are subtle discrimination and the difficulty of combining scientific careers with a family (The Chronicle, December 3).
An irony in Mr. Summers’s statements -- and the pillorying he has received from women at his institution and elsewhere -- is that the oldest and most generous program to help female professors facing the work-family crunch began at the Harvard Medical School. The Scholars in Medicine program gives at least $25,000 a year for one to two years to professors who are just starting their careers.
Eleanor G. Shore, who was dean of faculty affairs at the medical school until she retired in 2004, started the program 10 years ago. “We want the money to be used to buy protected time during the day for academic work: research, writing, and preparing grant applications -- whatever it is in their field they have trouble getting done,” she says. “They can buy a research assistant’s time or buy out of clinical work. Whatever it takes to give them protected time.”
Dr. Shore is now a senior consultant at the medical school, and she says that without that kind of help, some women with families simply give up their research careers in favor of full-time patient care. “The research and the writing, those are all quiet things,” she says. “Your children make a racket, your patients make their needs known, but your research and writing just sits there quietly and you don’t do it.”
In all, about 240 faculty members at the Harvard Medical School have received grants totaling $8.75-million since 1995. Although that may sound like a lot, the grants to help female scientists are fairly small. The University of Washington, for example, has doled out $727,443 in awards ranging from $5,000 to $38,000.
At Harvard, Dr. Shore doesn’t have precise figures, but she says the vast majority of the grants have gone to women with children. But Christopher Kabrhel, an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at the medical school, is an exception. He has turned his $25,000 fellowship over to the hospital to hire doctors to cover a portion of his work week in the emergency room so that he can attend a new clinical-research training program at Harvard this summer and spend more time with his 2-year-old daughter, Sadie. The two are together most Wednesdays, going for bike rides, playing the guitar (Sadie has a child-sized one), and reading books.
Dr. Kabrhel says he initially felt guilty about taking a fellowship designed for women. “I’m sensitive to the idea that women have it harder than men in making their academic and family careers work, and I didn’t want to be competing for an award with women who deserve it,” he says. But his wife, who is pregnant with their second child, is a lawyer with the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General. “Her career is just as demanding and high powered as mine,” says Dr. Kabrhel, so he felt he qualified for the grant.
As part of the fallout over Mr. Summers’s remarks, the president established a task force to recommend ways to help women at the university succeed in science and engineering. In May the group proposed extending the Scholars in Medicine program to female scientists across the university.
Creative Uses
While Harvard’s program focuses strictly on helping professors in the lab or with their clinical work, the University of Michigan has looked beyond the workplace at ways female scientists say they are struggling. For example, one professor did not want to uproot her school-age children during a sabbatical, so the institution paid to bring her collaborators to the campus so that the professor’s family did not have to travel.
Another, Kathleen L. Collins, an assistant professor of internal medicine, asked for $5,000 to take her nanny and two young children to a meeting in Mexico of the American Society for Microbiology. Dr. Collins, whose research concerns how HIV is different from other viruses, says she couldn’t leave her kids -- then aged 4 years and 14 months -- at home with her husband, a physician who is frequently on call. And because they were so young, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving them for a week with a baby sitter. She could have stayed home altogether, but that might have damaged her career.
“You have two kids, and it might be 8 or 10 years getting them through from infanthood to school age,” says Dr. Collins. “You can’t drop out of science for that amount of time and expect to get back in.”
So Dr. Collins attended the meeting this year with her two children and the nanny in tow, made a presentation, met some collaborators from other institutions, and received an invitation to talk about her research at another conference next March. By then, she figures, the children will be old enough to stay at home with a baby sitter.
Part of the money Michigan gave to female scientists came from a National Science Foundation Advance grant, which is aimed at changing institutional policies to help female scientists succeed. Dr. Stewart, the Michigan professor who administers the program there, says mothers usually have more restrictions on their time than fathers. “My best guess is there aren’t as many men who have this need or conceive of themselves as so responsible for the children that they can’t go do these things,” she says.
She realizes that people will question why the university is paying for child care. But she adds: “I think it is a new way to think about what it means for institutions to say, We want to support the whole person. We want to make it possible for everybody to have a career in science, as primary caregivers.”
But Ms. Burkett says universities should recognize everyone’s family responsibilities -- not just mothers’. “What if I’m a young male or female scientist and my spouse has cancer and is extremely sick? What if my mother is very ill and needs a lot of care?” asks Ms. Burkett. “To decide that some family responsibilities are socially more valuable than other family responsibilities is imposing a very narrow definition.”
‘Envy in the Lab’
Milton J. Hernandez, director of the Office of Special Populations and Research Training at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recalls “getting a lot of raised eyebrows around the table” when he told his colleagues about the institute’s new $500,000 program to help female postdoctoral fellows with young children hire help in the lab.
“We wondered: How is this going to work out in terms of envy in the lab? This woman gets a technician, and I work my butt off, and I don’t get one,” he recalls. The grants have just been doled out so it is not clear yet how people will react.
Harvard’s Scholars in Medicine program does help women who are caring for aging parents. And both the Universities of Washington and Wisconsin have tried to avoid conflicts by directing money not just to mothers but to any professor facing career troubles due to family problems or difficult life circumstances.
For example, Wisconsin helped an assistant professor of pediatrics, who has no children, hire laboratory help after she was hit by a bus while riding her bike on the campus. And Washington covered a course for a male professor of mathematics whose newborn daughter faced a life-threatening health problem and complicated surgery.
Still, at Washington and the other institutions, grant recipients are usually female. The university gave $20,000 to Martha M. Bosma, an assistant professor of biology, who had trouble finding time to apply for research grants because she has a young son with developmental problems who suffered from seizures. The money allowed her to buy some pregnant mice and change the direction of her research, looking at the development of the hindbrain, which controls speech and muscle tone. “My son has a severe speech deficit and I said: I’m going to work on that,” says Ms. Bosma.
Cathy A. Trower, a research associate in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, applauds universities for finding innovative ways to help female scientists. But she thinks institutions ought to rethink the entire way academic science works.
“We finally realize we have a problem: Women aren’t succeeding at the same rate as men,” she says. “But we’ve decided to make up all of this other stuff instead of re-examining the structure we’ve built up, which is rigid and unforgiving. There is only one way to be successful, and that means that in science you are available 24/7 to be in the lab, to follow your research wherever it is going on at any given time.” For both men and women, she says, “that means you can’t have any outside distractions.”
Ms. Bosma knows that all too well. She has already delayed her tenure bid twice because of the time she has spent helping her disabled son, and she worries about how that will affect her prospects when she finally comes up for tenure later this year.
“I don’t have the public recognition and the international acclaim that I should at my level,” she acknowledges. “I’ve done all of this on a slightly different pathway. But if you want to include everybody, that means everybody with family issues. I’m not going to march along the same path as everyone else.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 51, Issue 46, Page A6