Part 2 of "The Princess Scientist"

Where have all the women gone?

In the second installment of The Princess Scientist, I will address what I call “mommy tracking”.

I knew I wanted to be a professor when I applied to graduate school in 1987. I was accepted to several top programs and I do not believe gender was too much of an issue. It didn’t appear that men enjoyed higher acceptance rates into graduate programs, even “back then”. What I did note was that, while our graduate program was predominantly female, the faculty members were predominantly male. On the very first day of graduate school, I remember asking one of the few female professors in our program, “Where did the women go? There are more women than men in the PhD program and hardly any female faculty.”

“Mommy tracked,” she replied. She was both a mother and a professor and had been a pioneer in her field.

“Such a thing would never happen to me,” I mused. And it didn’t, at least not like that.

In academia, “mommy tracked” means a woman has children and drops out of the race for a faculty position, at whatever level she was in at the time. This often occurs during a post-doctoral fellowship, which is the step immediately after getting a PhD. For those unfamiliar with the academic science track, a post-doctoral fellowship is a “mentored-independent” project that is carried out in a lab with expertise in the area. A postdoc will usually bring expertise from their graduate lab and apply it to another field, with the goal of carving out a new area of research, sufficiently distinct from both the work of graduate and postdoctoral mentors. This often corresponds with the average age at which people marry and start a family.

There is immense pressure to publish during the post-doctoral years, and publications will be the primary factor that determines your marketability for faculty positions. This means long hours in the laboratory and very little desk work. Furthermore, post-doctoral fellowships are low-paying positions, creating an impetus to move on to the next stage sooner rather than later. Women often find it difficult to juggle a child and  the requirements of a post-doc, resulting in the phenomenon of  “mommy-tracking” because once a child is born, it is not easy to jump back into something as demanding as creating a name for yourself in a scientific field, and research often progresses so quickly that you can get left behind after only a few years off. We can spend time arguing about how this is an antiquated idea and that men can also be the ones that are the primary caregiver, and that the choice to dedicate oneself to an academic career is a decision independent of gender. Sometimes, men are the primary caregivers, or a couple splits the caregiving duties equally, but there are indisputable differences in the biology of men and women that impact the propensity of each to prioritize caregiving. It is completely incongruous for the scientific community to ignore the connection a woman has with the child she carried for 9 months. Research in neuroendocrinology has taught us about hormones involved in maternal behavior, and it should be common knowledge to anyone in the life sciences that women are naturally more likely to be driven to sideline a career to care for a child; it isn’t due to any kind of patriarchal societal influence. If anything, the emergence of couples that share parental duties equally and the increased numbers of women who will prioritize careers are examples of the patriarchy dominating over nature. One choice is not better than the other, but to reward people, male or female, who adopt a more biologically male approach to work/family balance, is the very definition of sex discrimination.

Getting “mommy tracked” is more obvious when a woman doesn’t even enter the academic world, but it can happen to women who have tenure-track or tenured positions as well. The balance of being a mother and a professor in the sciences presents a struggle that is different for every woman and this is where the current approach to gender roles can present roadblocks. Many women are faced with career limitations, even post-tenure, that go largely ignored in our male-centric world of academic science. One can argue that the term “mommy-tracking” is catering to sex stereotypes, and I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that men can experience the same limitations if they choose to prioritize family. However, this does not change the fact that, statistically, more women will end up being impacted by a system that favors those who do not prioritize family time. Over 20% of male faculty members have stay-at-home partners, compared to only 5% of female faculty members. The vast majority of mothers in academic science are married to people who are also academic scientists at the same university. The academic couple model affords flexibility, both in terms of hours and in terms of relocation. This is so common that universities routinely do what is called a “spousal hire”, offering a faculty position to both the top candidate and their partner, in order to close the deal. Faculty couples are more likely to have similarly flexible schedules that allow sharing of child-rearing responsibilities, picking up each other’s slack at home to accommodate work responsibilities. I knew a handful of female faculty members who had partners in jobs with relatively standard hours, limited travel and that could relocate without significant loss of job opportunities. I have not met many tenure track or tenured faculty members who were married to someone with an upwardly mobile corporate job as was the case for me.

My own experience provides an example of the ways in which academia inadvertently discriminates against women who prioritize family. When I began my faculty position, I was pregnant with our first child. Thus, my entire faculty career began with the decision to geographically limit my job search. I was finishing a second postdoc position, and I had just published a seminal paper that changed the way we look at signaling complexes. There were only a handful of open faculty positions at major research universities looking for someone in my field, and I interviewed for several. My husband was not interested in academia, and was looking for biotech positions, which placed a geographic limitation on both of our job possibilities-to places with good opportunities for both academia and industry. It was shortly after my first interview that I discovered I was pregnant, placing a time pressure on our job searches. I had an offer for a tenure-track position at an excellent university and, although there wasn’t a core group in my research area there, it seemed too good to turn down. My husband got an industry position that was a mere 30-minute commute away. There were numerous ways in which my chosen university supported women in positions such as mine, such as on-campus day care and a stop-the-clock policy that allowed new parents to take an extra year for achieving tenure, with no penalty.  Now I see that at the onset of my career, I prioritized family over a perfect research fit. That was step one of the type of “mommy-tracking” I experienced, because the most successful scientists operate in a collaborative core. I’m not saying that this choice was a bad one, or even that I wouldn’t have chosen it under different circumstances. My point is that prioritizing family at the onset of my career narrowed my choices ever so slightly.

I began my faculty position pregnant and had my second child less than two years later. Starting a job as a new mother certainly changed the aggressiveness with which I jumped into my career -which was step 2 in the “mommy-tracking”.  While my choice had been influenced by the nearby opportunity for my husband in industry, he still had a commute, and the daycare facility closed at 5pm, leaving me with less flexibility than my peers who either had no children or who had a spouse working nearby. It was a very subtle difference. I obtained a New Investigator award, published solid papers relatively quickly and then secured a large NIH grant within my first few years on faculty. On the surface I had it all-successful lab, two kids, taking on some leadership roles in the department, getting invited to give seminars, etc. But my competitors published even higher profile papers, and had multiple NIH grants, or were part of larger project grant teams. It shouldn’t come down to a competition in that way, but parenting is a full-time job and so is being a professor. And you don’t get credit for being a parent when it comes to merits and promotions, or by grant review panels.

The next stage of my “mommy-tracking” experience, had to do with another rarely- discussed feature of women in science—the career of your spouse. I had never thought about the importance of what career you partner has; industry and academia seem like a good match, but they actually are not. This may explain why I was the only person I have met in academia that was married to a high-ranking executive of a company, and his colleagues were always surprised to learn that his wife was a professor. Had my husband and I been at the same stage and both going the academic route, we might have looked for faculty positions together. Early on, there was only a small imbalance in sharing the parental load, but as he began to move up the corporate ladder, two major things happened that derailed me. First, he began to travel—10%, then 25%, then 50% and then almost 70% of the year. He started to get head-hunted for jobs all over the globe, and he started to operate on a “5-year plan” with the desire to move around from job to job. This meant I had to either move with him, demand that my career be prioritized over his, or break up the family with a distance relationship. Being married to someone in a career where mobility is the key to success is something no one considers when looking at female success in science. His need to move around forced me to examine my career satisfaction in a way that I would not have done had we not had such different careers.

It was shortly after I received tenure that my husband was head-hunted for a job at a Japanese pharmaceutical company, with a main US location in San Diego-  90 miles from my university. We moved in-between to “split the commute”. He had told me the more established company would have more regular hours and he would be able to pick up the kids from the after-school program 2-3 times a week and be home for dinner. One of the advantages to living near campus is the ability to leave to go pick up a child from daycare, have dinner, do nighttime reading, and still pop back into lab to monitor an experiment. This was something that I would give up by moving away and taking on a commute. Shortly after we moved, he flew up the corporate ladder, ending up as Global Head of Immunology, spending the majority of his time out of the country. This was step 4 of my mommy-tracking- I now had a 50-minute commute to work and was essentially a single parent. At first, no one could tell, by looking at my productivity, what was happening. I was able to juggle carpools, dance competitions, piano lessons, homework, and chaperoning field trips with running a lab, lecturing, curriculum-planning and chairing committees.

As I moved into the dreaded “mid-career” stage, I was not publishing and turning grants around as fast as my male counterparts, or even my female counterparts who were in more supportive home environments. While friends and many of my female students, were impressed by my ability to juggle career and family, academia in general was not. Why do I consider this to be gender bias in science? I could have missed out on some of the kids’ activities, hired a nanny, worked late in the lab, or read papers into the wee hours of the night after my daughters went to bed, and sometimes I did.  It was my choice to either do that or not to do it. But I didn’t want to miss out on any part of my children’s life. I wanted to be a mom and be there for all these things. I wanted to drive them to dance sometimes, listen to their piano practice, help them with their homework, watch them grow up. It was a priority. If I was at work, and I got a desperate text from one of the girls needing me, I hopped in my car and drove the 50 miles home. I don’t get counted as one of those who was “mommy tracked”, but having a traveling husband, a long commute, and an unwillingness to hand parenting over to someone else amounted to my career veering onto a different track. I only went to conferences for which I was an invited speaker, eliminating the networking opportunities that these conferences offer. I avoided administrative positions that involved travel or wining and dining of any kind. Networking and administration weren’t why I went into science anyway.

The world of academic science unwittingly presumes that the women who prioritize family have been preselected out of the pool before taking a faculty position.   Like so many things in our world, task forces come up with mechanisms for helping women succeed in academic science, like “stop-the-clock” and childcare, that only help during the first few years of your child’s life. The thing is, it’s actually fairly easy to juggle kids and science when they’re little. You can put a baby in a sling and sit at your computer, put her down in a play pen and run a gel. Time the feeding right, and you can have her sleeping in the back of the room during faculty meeting. When they get older, but are too young to drive or organize themselves, that’s when parenting is the most time-consuming. Late nights doing algebra and reading history together takes more time than breast feeding and changing diapers. The motivation to pull out a technical journal article or work on a grant after a day at work, 100 miles of driving, chauffeuring to and from activities, cooking and cleaning, and 2 hours of math and history is pretty low. Given all of that, I was still productive.

I knew many  female scientists that would never pass on a seminar or conference to go to a dance competition, and some may criticize me for presuming this is a dilemma that presents itself to female and not male scientists. Regardless of any exceptions to the rule, women are still more likely to feel the need to raise their children. This is the very reason so many women get mommy tracked and why we still have more stay-at-home mothers than stay-at-home fathers in our society. There is a tendency to conflate the act of not disparaging a woman’s choice to be a working mother with encouraging the prioritization of work over family. We can separate these two things, but like all other progressive movements in society, it requires that we address the nuances rather than hide behind hashtags and stereotypes.