Imagine you have spent ten years of your life prepping for your first post-PhD job – a four-year undergraduate study, maybe a year or two of Master’s, followed by four years for a PhD. At this point you may have met, and even married someone, and are thinking about your future. Except your job is not at all secure – you consider yourself lucky to have landed a three-year post doctorate position, the first rung on the post-PhD academic career ladder, but now there is heightened pressure to “get results” and publish well. Fail to do that and you won’t land the next post-doc, let alone that coveted “permanent” academic job. Now you find out you are pregnant – how will you juggle maternity leave, childcare, and advancing your career in the cut-throat world of science?
Enter “roving researchers”, academia’s answer to parental leave. Outside of academia, this is called a maternity cover, except usually an industry position is a permanent contract and the cover on a fixed term. Roving researchers are, quite simply, fixed termers covering for other fixed termers. Except PhD students and technicians are given lower priority, such is their lowly status is the academic pecking order.
Academia has a parent problem. The problem is that in this day and age once researchers get to the stage of a postdoc, they are in their late twenties to early thirties, the prime age for starting a family. It is well-known that the issue of parental leave is highly skewed – while men can rely on their female partners to take paid leave, and continue to advance their careers, women have a stark choice of raising a family and permanently damaging their academic career, or delaying childbearing and risk leaving it too late.
The problem of parental leave is a contributing factor to academia’s “leaky pipeline”. Women are almost three times more likely as their male counterparts to leave academia within three years of having children. Their rates of childlessness are much higher. Academia is a hostile environment for family life; frequent moves means uprooting every few years, coupled with job insecurity and low pay. I saw the gender disparities first-hand myself; while I often met men who had wives and children, I never met any women whose partners weren’t also academics. Quite often they were single, or coupled but childless.
We can’t pretend that choices are made in a vacuum, or that highly educated women don’t make informed choices about their lives. The precarity of academia, and all that entailed upon my life certainly directed my choices. So is hiring a band of travelling researchers the answer to solving the parental leave problem? Whilst it may alleviate some of the pressures, it seems to risk creating another layer of academic precarity. In this case, it seems perfectly fine to hire and use the skills of highly educated researchers, but as the Nature article suggests they risk getting no credit for their efforts: “…a roving researcher has little time to develop their own research. They might co-author papers if they contribute data, but owing to the short rotation schedule, rovers are unlikely to earn the first-author credentials that make a candidate competitive in the faculty job market.” However, even this is sold as a boon to accessing an industry career, where the “…role opens doors in industry by offering the rare opportunity to diversify training and compare methods as they change between groups.” I did note that there no examples in the article of men doing these so-called coveted roving roles.
What the article seems to suggest is that having an extra layer of precarious employment, covered predominantly by women, to cover the care leave problems of mainly female workers also on precarious contracts, is a desirable fix to the problem. The issue is that the precarity itself is the problem. And I doubt that there is an overarching willingness to fix this systemic issue. Until that is addressed, men and women in academia are likely to continue to have vastly different career experiences and expectations.
This Ȼ Life 