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Despite the fact that women have gained tremendous ground in earning Ph.D.s over the last 30 years -- women now earn more than half of social sciences doctorates and close to half of life sciences doctorates -- recent reports published by the National Academies indicate that women, and sometimes men, who assume a large portion of child care responsibilities, are seen as a “bad investment” when it comes to granting tenure.
It is an effect that Harvard hopes to combat. Harvard’s Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity is experimenting with a pilot grant program that helps scholars advance their academic careers while raising families.
Megan Carey, 33, is finishing her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School and beginning to apply along with her husband, also an academic, for tenure-track faculty positions, while the two of them raise their infant son.
The choice between family and career has led many parents and spouses, women in particular, to opt out of tenure-track positions at research institutions. Carey’s own experiences with this drop-off are typical at many universities.
“In my graduate class there were 10 neuroscientists, four women – two of them are no longer doing research, and all of the men still are,” Carey said.
Carey’s worries about the future stem from more than just the challenges that come with a growing family. Even someone who can devote every waking moment to career development may not find any faculty openings, as universities decide which departments receive funding and what science is on the verge of breakthrough.
“I don’t know how to describe this feeling of being a postdoc and spending so many years working towards this one goal and then realizing that it might not be attainable, and that you might not find out until you’re 35, or 38,” Carey said.
Last year, however, Carey was a recipient of a Research Enabling Grant from the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity. The grant program is designed for rising academics, either postdoctoral fellows or junior faculty members, who show a great deal of promise, but who are also responsible for caring for children or other dependents. Recipients use one-year grants of up to $75,000 to hire additional staff, purchase new equipment that makes research more efficient, or take family along on field research.
Although Harvard faculty can take advantage of family leave programs, researchers often find that putting projects on hold means that research could be irrelevant by the time it’s resumed. At the least, scientists cannot work from home.
“What makes science a little bit more difficult than some other academic pursuits for someone who wants to have a family is the fact that, to do experiments, you have to be in the lab,” Carey said. Her experiments also require her to spend six-hour blocks of time in the lab.
Carey’s research focuses on the neural basis of behavior, discovering the way a brain allows us to execute complex movements, like driving a car or playing a piano, without much conscious thought. In order to keep her research from derailing over her maternity leave during a crucial period of her study, Carey used her Research Enabling Grant to hire a lab technician.
“In a sense, (the Research Enabling Grant) gave me a guilt-free maternity leave, because I knew that work was still getting done, and I had hired someone who was contributing to the lab,” said Carey. “Instead of being a burden, I was actually providing something to the lab.”
Earlier this year, Theresa Betancourt, an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, had an opportunity to work with Partners in Health to study mental health problems in Rwandan children with HIV/AIDS.
Betancourt has spent more than ten years doing public health studies around the world, working with non-governmental organizations in war zones. Now raising two young children, Betancourt was less able to work in active conflict zones, and the Partners in Health project presented an ideal opportunity to work in a post-conflict setting on a topic new to her, the mental health of HIV/AIDS-affected children. This new research could help build a framework to greatly expand and improve care for Rwandan children and their families.
“Rwanda now has a very strong government, and Partners in Health works closely with the government, which is very committed to building capacity on the ground,” Betancourt said. “We really have the potential to develop an evidence base about models that work. Research like this has the potential for a greater scope of impact, upon publishing research of this type for scientific and practitioner audiences, but also by disseminating our findings within policy channels and working closely with the government and the on-ground practitioners.”
In June, Betancourt was awarded a Research Enabling Grant to arrange for child care during her trip to Rwanda and to support a study coordinator to help her collect data.
“The need for mental health programs in this population is very apparent, and the Partners in Health Staff has for some time been aware that this an issue, but this research will be a catalyst I think, a chance to really begin to address and examine these issues more fully,” said Betancourt.
Without access to a Research Enabling Grant, she said, her research might not get off the ground.
“It would be a tremendous opportunity loss,” she said. “Right now I have the chance to do this with a tremendous organization like Partners in Health and do it where they’re really growing their pediatric HIV/AIDS program.”
Jesse Snedeker, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, used a Research Enabling Grant to hire a research coordinator and to purchase eye-tracking equipment that will make her research into language learning in children more efficient. Snedeker says that while the grant will help her spend more time with her two children, she would be affecting careers other than her own if she had to shut down her lab.
“There’s bigger cost in graduate student training. I can’t afford to stop my research for three or four months, I can’t let graduate students continue unsupervised, I wouldn’t be there to review manuscripts, and I’d be leaving with an experiment in progress and be unavailable to help correct problems as they come up,” said Snedeker.
“It would take several months to wind down and several months to start up again, and in the meantime there would be five or six graduate students whose careers were being put on hold to some degree.”
Snedeker adds that the rapid pace of scientific discovery means that it is hard to determine whether research will still be relevant after several months of inactivity, and she was uncomfortable having to choose between her family and her career.
“I was intrigued by the [Research Enabling Grants] program, it seemed like a really good idea,” said Snedeker. “There are lots of programs out there that give you money for child care, which is helpful, there are a lot of programs that try and find a way for you to stop working for awhile, which I’m totally uninterested in doing, and I was excited about a program that was going to say ‘Okay, there are problems in being in two places at once, how is it that you solve those problems?’”