Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory

  • Emily Monosson
Cornell Univ. Press: 2008. 232 pp. $25, £13.95 9780801446641 | ISBN: 978-0-8014-4664-1

Confront a scientist with data and they will suggest a hypothesis to explain them. When confronted with the dearth of women in the scientific profession, scientists often try to connect gender — female — with a physiological reason for absence — motherhood. Family, they say, must be the reason that there are so few women in the sciences, as the years when women start families coincide with those when young scientists are building academic careers.

This hypothesis does contain a kernel of truth: the academic profession, which evolved from medieval monasteries, was not designed with a dual-career family in mind. The modern workplace is still evolving, far too slowly, towards a gender-equal world, where both parents have busy lives and both can pursue their scientific passions.

Motivated by her own struggles to balance motherhood and work, toxicologist Emily Monosson collects in Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory the parenting experiences of nearly three dozen mothers and scientists, two of whom are her daughters. She groups these viewpoints by era, starting with women who came of age scientifically in the 1970s and going up to the present day. One sees the gradual changes that have resulted from, and helped to support, a steadily increasing presence of women in science.

It is harder to raise a family as a supermarket employee than as a professor of physics.

But progress is not steady enough. Those of us who raised families in the 1990s pushed to replace 'disability leave' with proper 'maternity leave' and to create rooms where mothers could express breast milk. We tried to get on-site day care, although we were rarely successful. We thought these accommodations were a good start and a done deal. Yet, as the disturbing stories of women who got their PhDs in the past decade make clear, university women still confront ignorance and inflexibility. Many practices that should have vanished — lack of maternity leave or the inability of employers to cope with pregnant employees — are still with us.

Evolutionary biologist Gina Wesley-Hunt (PhD 2003), tells us she “was fired for getting pregnant”. Katherine Douglass, a physician and Monosson's daughter, describes the difficulty of finding a romantic partner who would view her as an equal. A young nursing mother, Deborah Duffy (PhD, Psychology, 2001), recalls an all-day interview for a faculty position without the requested breaks for pumping breast milk. “As I sat there doing my best impression of a dairy cow,” she writes, “I recall thinking, 'What a bizarre experience.'” My fervent hope is that the experiences described in Motherhood become less bizarre — not because female science professors do not have children but because they do, thus helping their colleagues become familiar with the process.

Monosson's book sets out the variety of paths possible for scientist mothers, but it contains few stories about women who have successfully combined traditional careers as science professors with traditional families. I know many such women. I am one, as is Stefi Baum — astronomy professor, mother of four, an old friend and a contributor to the book. It is unfortunate if young women approach their futures convinced that they have to make radical compromises to combine family and science. The more young women who push forwards assuming, as young men routinely assume, that it is possible to 'have it all', the sooner that will be possible for everyone. It would be a shame if, after reading this book, young women got the opposite message.

More disturbing is the implication that in the absence of motherhood, women in academic science would have untroubled careers. This is naive. Evidence shows that female scientists without children do not fare better than those with children who remain full-time in the workforce. Neither advance as steadily as their male counterparts, with or without children. Some explanation other than family must be the reason for the slow advancement of women.

Furthermore, countries with enviable support systems for parental leave and childcare — of the kind rightly advocated by Monosson — have astonishingly low participation of women in science. For example, in Denmark, only around 10% of full professors of science, and 2% of physics professors, are women. The numbers are higher in the United States, even with its less generous childcare policies. Neither does physiology and family explain why the fraction of scientists who are women varies widely from one country to another, even when social support systems are similar; the percentage of female scientists is much higher in France and Italy than in the United Kingdom or Germany, for example. Women's participation in science also varies widely from field to field: more than 50% of graduating MDs in US medical schools are women, whereas in physics and engineering, less than 20% of PhDs go to women.

Outside our universities, many women with young children have full-time jobs — 70% in the United States — and few of those jobs are as flexible or as well paid as jobs in academic science. There is no question that it is harder to raise a family as a supermarket employee than as a professor of physics, so why do academics seize on family as the explanation for the absence of women? The dominant obstacles to women in science — persistent, unexamined bias and lack of mentoring — are described clearly in Beyond Bias and Barriers (National Academies Press, 2007) and in Academeology, by the pseudonymous blogger Female Science Professor (LuLu, 2008; see Nature 456, 445; 2008). Young women trying to figure out the road to success in science might be better served reading those books rather than Motherhood.