{"id":6743,"date":"2024-09-15T10:48:48","date_gmt":"2024-09-15T09:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6743"},"modified":"2024-09-15T10:48:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-15T09:48:48","slug":"what-can-i-do-to-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2024\/09\/15\/what-can-i-do-to-help\/","title":{"rendered":"What Can I Do to Help?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Men who\u2019ve heard me talk about my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science<\/a>), or more generally about the issues facing women in STEM, not infrequently ask me this question: what can I do to help? I can point them towards the helpful list<\/a> I first published about nine years ago, and which I frequently use in my talks as the last slide, to leave on the screen during Q+A. But perhaps I should also point them towards the book I\u2019m currently reading, Unrooted<\/a><\/em> by Erin Zimmerman<\/a>, with its subtitle of Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science<\/em>. The Canadian scientist is an evolutionary botanist, and a significant part of her book is dedicated to her love of that branch of biology, and her dismay that botany, in its classical form, is fading due to lack of funding and support, while molecular approaches take centre stage.<\/p>\n

However, the part of the book I want to stress here is that summed up in the second word of the subtitle: motherhood and all the accompanying challenges for an early career researcher. Zimmerman thought, like many another young scientist, that she wanted and was destined for a career as an academic. However, her experiences of postdoc-ing while pregnant and after returning to work after the birth of her daughter (she was only entitled to four months maternity leave), demonstrated, for her, that the battle to combine the different roles became unmanageable in the face of an unsupportive boss.<\/p>\n

That is the key point. He wasn\u2019t overtly hostile, even particularly sexist, he simply failed to understand what she was going through, or how her experiences resulting from what he said and did and, just as importantly, by what he didn\u2019t say or do, impacted her. Her experiences, I fear, are far from uncommon. Yes, there are misogynistic professors out there who are much more explicitly unpleasant, or even harassers and predators. But there are plenty more (and some of them women too), who simply have no imagination or sympathy for their team. All they are focussed on are the results, the papers, and being able to get the next grant. Sadly, our system of academic incentives currently makes such a focus unsurprising. The supervisors\u2019 survival (particularly if they are still on tenure track or its equivalent) depends on these outcomes and not the wellbeing of the researcher.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman describes this tension, this slow destruction of her ability to keep going in the face of apparent insensitivity and unawareness of what she\u2019s going through, in miserable detail. It\u2019s something many supervisors would be well advised to read if they want to be able to support their researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach time you\u2019re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you\u2019re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation\u2026it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn\u2019t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you love the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am sure those words will resonate with many women who have wanted to combine their love of science with love of their child(ren), but struggled.<\/p>\n

Yet the reality is that academia should be quite flexible. Zimmerman\u2019s complaint was in part that her boss simply made things difficult any time she wanted to deviate from what he saw as the \u2018normal\u2019 way of working. If she wanted to start early to fit in with when childcare was available, he seems to have rolled his eyes before giving grudging approval. Presenteeism should not be necessary in academic life, although some experiments (particularly with living organisms, which by and large her plants were not) may put certain demands on timings to make sure they stay alive. But otherwise, getting the job done \u2013 including reading at home in the evenings, if that\u2019s what works \u2013 should be the only thing that matters, not when, or even where, it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

I was clearly lucky in many ways when I combined motherhood and my science. It was a different age (four months maternity leave was generous then) and people \u2013 certainly in the Cavendish \u2013 hadn\u2019t had to think about these issues before: as I was the first female lecturer there, I was obviously the first person to try to make this combination work. Maybe this made it easier as people collectively seemed to want it to go well. No one checked what hours I worked, as long as I turned up to lecture and run the practical classes at the appropriate times (and my working hours were extremely flexible, due to when childcare was available and how my husband and I shared the rest of the week). I didn\u2019t have to go through the indignities of pumping milk in unsuitable surroundings, as Zimmerman did, since advice on how long to keep a baby on breastmilk alone was very different then, although I kept breastfeeding in part for many more months after I went back to work. I was shattered by these early months, lecturing at 9am when I thought my legs might give way I was so tired, but at no point was I faced with disapproval or even comment.<\/p>\n

So, supervisors in general, think a little harder about what the young parents in your team may be going through and work out how to make it easier so that they can deliver what you want. Making their life a misery through inattention, disapproval or worse, will actually make the outcomes less successful for the whole team. A period of irregular working may still be significantly more productive than allowing someone\u2019s drive to \u2018wilt\u2019, to use Zimmerman\u2019s word.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo keep making my way up the ladder with no additional thought given to my happiness or comfort in the workplace was getting frustrating. I felt like after more than a decade in research, I\u2019d earned some basic consideration.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, if you want everyone in your team to be both successful in themselves and contribute to the success of your wider team, show a little consideration\u2026.I think that\u2019s the next piece of advice I should proffer when I\u2019m asked in the future \u2018what can I do to help?\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Men who\u2019ve heard me talk about my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), or more generally about the issues facing women in STEM, not infrequently ask me this question: what can I do … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5,27],"tags":[1062,1642,106,1056,1643],"class_list":["post-6743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-science-culture","category-women-in-science","tag-ecrs","tag-erin-zimmerman","tag-maternity-leave","tag-motherhood","tag-supervisors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6743"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6745,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions\/6745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}