{"id":2053,"date":"2017-07-27T15:15:12","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T19:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/phdplus\/?p=2053"},"modified":"2017-07-27T15:15:12","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T19:15:12","slug":"when-early-career-meets-early-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/phdplus\/2017\/07\/27\/when-early-career-meets-early-family\/","title":{"rendered":"When early-career meets early-family"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dogwood<\/a>

Dogwood Tree<\/a> by Christina VanMeter<\/a> on Flickr<\/a> licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

When my husband was first starting out in grad school, he took a crosslisted\u00a0graduate\/undergraduate physics class. One day the professor looked away from the board for a moment, gazed out at the class, and said, seemingly apropos of nothing, \u201cAcademia is not compatible with family life.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was also the day the only two female students in the class were both absent.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot to unpack in that line.\u00a0Sometimes, sexism isn\u2019t even subtle. This isn\u2019t the tyranny of low expectations, or unintentionally writing weaker letters for female students, or women getting crappier student evaluations. Sometimes, we\u2019re still straight-up telling people that women don\u2019t really belong here.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re telling men that they can\u2019t expect to both be a good father and succeed in this business, and that they\u2019d be ridiculous to even want that in the first place. When asked on a survey \u201cDo you think having children then is difficult to manage with being a scientist?\u201d one responded (also a physicist incidentally, not that I think they\u2019re all that much worse at this than we are) \u201cNo, absolutely not. That\u2019s why you have a wife.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

I couldn’t have finished grad school with a baby. I know people who\u2019ve done it and I think they\u2019re incredible. But it wouldn\u2019t have worked for us. For one thing, I doubt we could\u2019ve even afforded the hospital stay with our stipends and crummy insurance. I knew students who were foreign nationals who\u2019d fly home to have their babies where heath care was government-supported, because there\u2019s no way they could have paid for it here. Not to mention getting time off to recover, affording child care with no family nearby, and finding the time to teach and research. I barely finished as it was. I can\u2019t imagine doing it with a baby.<\/p>\n

Then we lived apart for three years while we finished school and postdocs and tried to find positions close to one another. Maybe we could have managed a baby then. But neither one of us wanted to spend such an important time in a child’s life apart, and that\u2019s completely ignoring the problem of timing. Ovulation doesn\u2019t schedule around school breaks and weekend redeye flights.<\/p>\n

So we got going late. Once you\u2019re over 35 you get branded at the doctor’s office with either \u201cgeriatric pregnancy\u201d or \u201cadvanced maternal age.\u201d I don\u2019t feel either geriatric or advanced, but\u00a0they didn’t ask me. I know about the increased risks, and the decreased fertility. But I also know that plenty of people have kids a little later and the vast majority\u00a0of them are just fine.<\/p>\n

But so far it hasn\u2019t been so lucky for us. A warning here: the rest of this post discusses managing the loss of a pregnancy. If you\u2019d rather skip out now, I don\u2019t blame you and I wish you the best of luck.<\/p>\n

This spring, as we got ready to close on our house, I found out I was pregnant. We were thrilled. I had thought for sure it\u2019d take us a long time, or maybe just wouldn\u2019t happen at all. But here I was, feeling like I had a chronic\u00a0hangover and barely able to keep a thought in my head, but happy.<\/p>\n

I knew the risk of miscarriage was nontrivial. The miscarriage rate for confirmed pregnancies is somewhere around 20-30%, but good data is hard to find. \u00a0So I did what a mathematician would do: I found a model that showed my approximate risk of miscarriage per day of pregnancy and watched that number slowly drop as I waited the agonizing four weeks for my first appointment. So far so good, but I also knew it was possible that I\u2019d already miscarried and my body didn\u2019t even know it yet.<\/p>\n

When I went for my ultrasound and the midwife found a too-small, too-dark spot on the screen, I thought I was prepared. I made the followup appointment, gathered my things (including the big bag of prenatal vitamins and mommy stuff they\u2019d given me before<\/em>\u00a0they did the ultrasound, for some reason – this bag is still in my trunk) and went back to the office.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t even make it that far. As soon as I saw my female colleagues, I lost it. They let me\u00a0go home. I did.<\/p>\n

After that awful first day, it honestly wasn\u2019t so\u00a0bad. Work went\u00a0on without me thanks to my incredibly supportive colleagues, including my co-blogger Beth who bailed me out of my bit of our Pi Mu Epsilon ceremony. Ultimately I needed surgery, but it was easy and almost painless and I even made it to a conference the next day. I had some complications the following week, but my husband was able to stay home with me and I still taught all the rest of my classes. He picked up all the slack at the house we\u2019d just moved into while my body tried to figure out what the hell just happened. It still hasn’t quite gotten back to normal. Maybe it never will.<\/p>\n

I was lucky. My husband was a dream and could take time off work so we could both recover. My insurance covered everything. My chair and colleagues were easy to talk to and more helpful and kind than I could ever have hoped for. I was never worried about how my absences and missed meetings and ungraded homework might affect my tenure dossier. A truly shocking number of friends came out of the woodwork to share the stories of their losses and, for most of them at least, their ultimate successes having adorable kids.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t even imagine what a early-career professor in this situation – male or female – would do if their chair was one of the two jackasses at the top of this article.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this not just to get it all off my chest, though I have had a hell of a time trying to write about anything else these last few months. I\u2019m writing this because while the academy has gotten a little better at dealing with\u00a0having families (The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics has issued a call for papers<\/a> for an upcoming issue on math and motherhood!), we\u2019ve only barely started talking about the pitfalls of trying to\u00a0start one. A fabulous\u00a0Chronicle article<\/a>\u00a0by Jessica Winegar was about all I found when I was grieving.\u00a0Her article is much more eloquent\u00a0and well-sourced than mine, but I’m writing this anyway. One column\u00a0about a problem this common\u00a0and this devastating isn’t enough. My words will have to do.<\/p>\n

It’s reasonable to put off children for the sake of an academic career, especially when the doors to the ivory tower slam shut behind\u00a0you if you leave even temporarily. It\u2019s a myth based on truly\u00a0ancient data<\/a>\u00a0that fertility drops off precipitously after 30 or 35. The idea of \u201cscheduling\u201d a baby around an academic calendar should die as too, because successful pregnancy is a poorly understood process and not the inevitability of nature they scare you into believing it is in high school health class.<\/p>\n

Chairs, advisors, tenure committees,\u00a0and administrators need to be aware of the issues their students or faculty members might be having outside of the office, and be willing to be flexible, including\u00a0extending\u00a0fellowships\u00a0or the tenure clock if necessary. There are\u00a0an awful lot of doctors appointments involved with issues of fertility and pregnancy, and not all of them can be scheduled around classes and conferences\u00a0and grant cycles. And due to all the weird taboos around early pregnancy,\u00a0your colleagues\u00a0might not want to give a ton of details about why they’re missing work.<\/p>\n

There are people\u00a0who would prefer that those who decide to devote their time to issues of family just stay out of the academy entirely, and leave the profession to those who are sufficiently dedicated to their field. Certainly it would be easier. But professors aren’t monks anymore. And believing that we should\u00a0be will continue to drive many of our best and brightest away from academia and into government or industry, where having a life outside of work is less of a liability. We have to be aware of\u00a0what we lose when we limit our vision for\u00a0how a good professor looks and acts.<\/p>\n

I hope this post can help to continue the conversation about how\u00a0to keep people in the academic mathematical community, whether they choose to have kids\u00a0or not. If you happen to bump into me (I’m in Chicago\u00a0at MathFest right now!) and you’d like to stop and chat, I hope you do. If you’d like to anonymously tell your story here in the comments, or share what you wish your chair or colleagues had done when you were dealing with loss and frustration, I hope you do. If you’d like to email me<\/a>, I hope you do.\u00a0For the sake of our sanity – and our profession – we must\u00a0be allowed to stop trying to do this alone.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my husband was first starting out in grad school, he took a crosslisted\u00a0graduate\/undergraduate physics class. One day the professor looked away from the board for a moment, gazed out at the class, and said, seemingly apropos of nothing, \u201cAcademia … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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