Parents in Academia

Raising a child in combination with a full-time career is no easy feat. That is true in general and maybe even more true in academia. Juggling the workload, conference attendance, or the potential requirement to move to a new job all become more demanding when children or other caretaking responsibilities are competing with each other. One would think that academia — a presumed flexible work environment — should be ideal for working parents, but often the focus on productivity measured in publications and funding secured does not make it easy to combine parenthood with science. As a result, around 34% of mothers leave STEM academia after having their first child (Powell, 2021). That is a huge loss of scientific talent.

With the aim of supporting parents in academia, sharing experiences with current and future parents, and collecting ideas on how to improve the system. We bring you a series on “Parents in Academia” a contribution by Lina Stein, Rodolfo Bezerra Nobrega, and Diana Spieler from the Young Hydrologic Society.

For this blog series, we gathered views on challenges, advice, and suggested changes in academia from several working parents in hydrology. Our aim is to offer reinforcement to early career scientists who are managing or going to take on childcare responsibilities.  What is the best time during your career to have a kid? (Spoiler alert: there is no best time). How to best organize the work-life-kids balance? How to manage conferences, school holidays, or moving because of a new job. We extend this blog series with a list of recommendations to institutions on how they can take a leading role in implementing these systematic changes needed in our field to reduce the hassle for child caretakers.

The series :

Part 1 : Timing. At what time during their academic career did people have children and what were the pros and cons of that.

Part 2 : Organisation. How do you best organize family life with research demands?

Part 3 : Systematic change. What needs to be done to improve the support of parents in academia?

If you are interested in contributing as an author, please contact our friendly editorial team (in Cc: younghydrologicsociety@gmail.com). We will help you effectively communicate your thoughts and ideas to an audience of fellow early career scientists. We are looking forward to hearing from you!