The Transparency Project: When you’re a scientist with a baby. And a lab.

Sari van Anders

September 13, 2013

You’ve gone through 9 months (more or less) of bodily changes; you’ve waited anxiously for the adoption forms to come in; you’ve gotten nervous, excited, sick, nauseous, overjoyed, down in the dumps, and bored; you’ve agonized over strollers; you’ve rubbed your partner’s feet; you’ve worried over finances… Before, you were a scientist. Now? You’re a scientist with a baby. And? Oh yeah: a lab.

This is the second iteration of The Transparency Project (see the first here), where we lay open the day-to-day practices of science as a feminist endeavor. This post isn’t about what kind of childcare to choose (hopefully you have great choices and the resources to access them), but instead about new parent-scientists who want to take a leave and are fortunate enough to be able to do so. We might be talking parental leave. Maternity leave. Paternity leave. Adoption leave. Etc. leave. (Etc. leave sounds A.W.E.S.O.M.E. because it’s so vague! Obviously, mine would be ‘good books + Portuguese custard tart’ leave.)

So, if you’ve chosen some sort of leave, what do you do? Other than, of course, joke with trusted friends about all the great baby experiments you wish you could do (don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about). Will you shut down your lab? Fire everyone? Stop signing forms, approving hours, supervising students? Will you really ignore the (cue horror music) tidal wave of emails that comes even if your away message says “Thanks for your message. I’m on leave and I’ve disappeared, and you can search hell to find me but good luck with that because I JUST NEED SOME TIME WITHOUT ENDLESS WAVES OF EMAIL BATTERING MY EXISTENCE!!! And, yes, Lab Coordinator, just order X from Scientific Company Z.”

I remember getting very skilled at typing one-handed (while I was eating bon bons with the other – just kidding! That hand was busy getting some form of carpal tunnel syndrome from holding my baby, which I didn’t even know was possible). But did I need to be so involved? Do we tell ourselves that our labs – and therefore our science – will shut down and end up in the gutter somewhere with no one to love them if we don’t keep a hand in… even if those hands are covered with yes-I-am-saying-it poop? On the other hand, why should we feel like we have to pick? Is this a classic ‘Life vs. Work, THE EPIC BATTLE’ as if science wasn’t life for many of us anyway? Obviously, there is no one answer; only as many answers as there are each of us, and our different times of life. But that doesn’t mean that hearing other people’s experiences isn’t thought-provoking or potentially useful. Or might be helpful as we work through some of the problems. I mean, someone’s got to have thought through most particular problems before, right?

Consider my super colleague Jacinta Beehner‘s story:

[Picture of Jacinta Beehner]

“For the past 7 years, I’ve been the director of a field site in the Simien Mountains National Park, Ethiopia, where my husband and I study the behavioral biology of wild geladas (a little-known primate that is closely related to baboons). I generally travel to the field site every year for a month or longer to make sure data collection is on-track, so I didn’t even think twice about taking my son for this annual expedition after he was born. I probably would have questioned the decision a bit more, had he been, say, only a month or two old – but as it happened, my annual trip occurred right after he turned 8 months. So, off we went to the highlands of Ethiopia for a month. I think because so many of my colleagues who study animal behavior in remote places do the same thing (that is, they just bring their kids along with them), it never occurred to me that this was a bit outside the parenting norm – that is, until we set out for the field site itself, a three-day journey from the capital city. Two days into our journey, when we were well in the middle of nowhere (which from a westerners perspective, means far away from medical care and any means of immediate evacuation), I dropped my son (accidentally of course!), head first, onto a stone staircase. I know that many mothers have dropped their children, but few of them were as far from proper medical care as I was that day (at least few of the mothers I know back in Michigan, anyway). My son was actually just fine (his skin was not broken, he did not have a concussion, and he only had a minor bruise where his head had hit), but that was the only time that I (temporarily) reconsidered my decision to bring my child to the field with me. Since that first journey, I now have a daughter as well and I’ve brought both of them to the field with me 2 more times with great success.”

Now, obviously not all of us have field sites as labs, much less those that require 1-2 day flights followed by three days of journey. For example, my lab is literally downstairs and to the right of my office, which is obviously quite far considering it used to be on the same floor (being in an office next to a field researcher has definitely cramped my complaining style). But all of us with kids have to decide the parameters of where our kids fit into our lab situation (if we’re lucky enough to be able to choose). Do we fit them in? Can we shut down our labs for a time? Maybe it’s not so much ‘what can we do?’ as it is ‘what have we done’ and ‘how has it worked.’