Fundamental Science: Is being a mother suffering in the academic curriculum?

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The text below celebrates the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated today, February 11th.

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It’s only seven o’clock in the morning, and instead of having a leisurely breakfast, I turn on the computer with a cup of coffee beside me so I can get work done. After thinking for a few minutes and writing the first two sentences of a text, a daughter wakes up hungry. I stop everything, go to the kitchen, make you breakfast, talk for a while, and go back to work. Ten minutes later the second daughter wakes up, and the whole cycle starts again. From there, the interruptions to meet the intense demands of two young children don’t stop. It is difficult to even produce a text about the difficulties of being a scientist working from home while taking care of children.

I think by now my peers and childless peers have had meetings, wrote articles, and started many other activities, while I’m still trying to complete the first paragraph of a text. “It’s choices”, many will say. In some cases they may be, but not always. In our country, half of pregnancies are unplanned. On top of that, women work about ten hours a week more than men on household chores and taking care of children and family members.

The Parent in Science movement, of which I am a part, researches and discusses the impacts of parenting on a scientific career. According to data from the group, more than half of female scientists in Brazil are the only or main caregivers of their children, and before the pandemic 45% of them said they could not work from home. Since the advent of social isolation and remote work, this scenario has intensified: only 47% of female scientists with children were able to submit the scientific articles they had planned before the start of the pandemic, against 76% of male scientists without children. Even considering only scientists with children, men and women, the female burden was evident: 28% of mothers of children aged between one and six years were able to submit their articles, against 52% of scientists fathers of children in the same age group.

In academic life, men and women, whites and blacks, with or without children, may even compete on an equal footing (following the same selection criteria), but not on an equal footing. Maternity leave, for example, which is so necessary and was hard-won in the academic community, can end up harming women. This break time to take care of the children is not taken into account when evaluating the performance of scientists: when submitting a project requesting funds for research, or when submitting a contest, everyone will be evaluated according to the publication of scientific articles in the last years old. Consequently, the woman who interrupted her career after maternity will be penalized in this assessment. This is one of the reasons for the difference in the number of women in the highest positions in the academic trajectory.

Women represent the majority of scientific initiation scholarship holders, still at graduation, in Brazil. However, they account for only about 25% of research productivity grantees at the highest level of the Brazilian career. Of Nobel laureates worldwide, only 6% are women. In addition, black and brown women with a doctorate represent less than 3% of postgraduate professors in our country. And who remembers the name of a Minister of Science and Technology? Well, we didn’t have any. This underrepresentation of women along the academic path brings many obstacles to the scientific and technological development of the country, since a science with more diversity is also a fairer and more efficient science.

Considering the period of maternity leave when evaluating the productivity of scientists is just one of the necessary steps on the path to equity. While we cannot go beyond the walls of academia and promote cultural and social changes, such as the equal participation of men and women in childcare, the system that promotes the advancement of scientists throughout their careers needs to change.

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Rossana Soletti is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and a member of the Parent in Science movement.

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