‘Maybe I was never meant to be in science’: how imposter syndrome seizes scientist mothers

Julie Gould: 00:09

Hello, and welcome to Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Julie Gould. This is the fourth episode in a series about female scientists in Latin America.

One challenge that many women face, whatever career path they’re in, and wherever they are in the world, is how to balance having a family and continuing on in their career.

“There is never a good time to have kids” is a phrase I’ve heard a lot when it comes to this conversation. But for some women in academia, choosing that time comes with many factors to consider.

In Latin America, as I’ve learned, women are penalized for having children. The small career break that they take to take care of the newborns, a time that should be full of joy and wonder (and let’s face it, emotional rollercoasters and tiredness galore too), is often tainted by the concerns over how this will affect their careers.

Mariana Viglino, a young female Latin American paleontologist based in Patagonia in the south of Argentina, and who we heard from in the third episode of this series, has seen how colleagues view pregnancy and maternity, and how they worry about starting families.

Mariana Viglino: 01:34

Not because they don’twant to, just they’re not able, because of the academic community is not taking into account the pressure and the time consuming task about raising a kid.

So that usually means that you as a woman who’s in charge of your family, you're going to be left behind, for sure.

There are actually many colleagues here who view that if you have a kid, particularly during your PhD, you’re just finishing your career.

That means the end of your career. They don’t view that you're going to be able to do research just because you’re going to have a kid. So that’s still, I think, a prevalent idea that some colleagues have.

Julie Gould: 02:11

It is for this reason, and some others that you’ll hear about from Fernanda Staniscuaski from Brazil, who founded the Parent in Science movement.

Fernanda Staniscuaski always knew that she was going to be a scientist and her career path was very linear for the first while. She majored in biology in college, worked in a research lab on plant defence systems whilst at university, entered a PhD program and finished at age 27. Then spent two years at the University of Toronto Mississauga doing a postdoc before returning to Brazil.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 02:42

I got hired at the university as a professor. So up to this point, my career was pretty linear. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was receiving grants.

I had some grants from funding agencies here in Brazil. I have some grants from international foundations. And everything was fine.

And I had my lab. I was advising students at the graduate level, so everything was okay until I had my son.

Julie Gould: 03:13

Fernanda was on track to becoming a full professor. But she was still at the beginning of her career when her first son was born in 2013, when she was 32 years old.

In Brazil, new mothers get six months leave. This is generous compared to other Latin American countries, Fernanda tells me. But….

Fernanda Staniscuaski 03:53

…when we come back after the leave, it doesn’t mean that we do not have any other responsibilities with the children we are raising.

So of course, I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity.

Julie Gould: 03:47

This includes publications, advising students, applying for grants, etc, etc. You know what it is,

Fernanda Staniscuaski 03:53

Since 2014, all my applications for grants, fellowships, everything, it came back, saying that I was not producing as much as my peers.

And that gave me a really bad feeling that okay, maybe I’m not able to keep up with my career because I decided to have children.

So maybe I was never meant to be in science or anything. And that was really bad because having children did not make me any less committed to my career. But of course, things change. So all of the nos I started receiving made me question my path as being a scientist.

Julie Gould: 04:43

But Fernanda didn’t give up. She continued to apply for grant funding to support her research, but it was an uphill struggle. Until in 2015, all funding dried up.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 04:54

In 2014, I was still having I was still having some funding. I was still trying to fight back. And getting myself back into my, my career. So everything was kind of okay. But in 2015, everything really changed. I did not have any had any funding to keep up with my lab or anything. I just had one or two students.

So the graduate program “Oh, you’re not advising as much as you need, and everything like that.”

So it took a while for me to realize what was happening. So in 2016, we actually made a decision that we will, we will do something.

Julie Gould: 05:33

This we is a group of other female scientists who were also mothers.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 05:38

I started talking to people that were going through the same thing. And we realized that it was not just me. It was something really bigger than myself.

And that’s how we decided that we would do something about it. And that’s how we, we started the Parent in Science movement.

Julie Gould: 05:57

The Parent in Science group officially started in 2016. And the first thing they did was to collect data,

Fernanda Staniscuaski 06:04

We didn’t have any data from Brazil, saying, “Oh, when you have a child, this happens with your publication record, this happens with the numbers in your career.”

So we started. The first thing we have done was to conduct a survey with professors here in Brazil that were parents.

And then we showed that, as expected, women that have children will have a decrease in their publication records and their productivity.

We did not see that for men that had children.

So we have this big difference.

And then with this data, we were able to go knock on the doors of the funding agencies and universities and say, “Oh, you can see here we have a problem. And it’s not something that is individual. It’s a structural problem.”

And that’s how the Parent in Science movement actually started working here. And provoking some changes that we have accomplished these few years.

So one thing that has become really clear for us is even though the situation here in Brazil is really drastic, we have much more going on than other in countries around here.

So when we look at the initiative and what's happening in other countries from Latin America, we are kind of ahead on the discussion.

We do have in Chile and in Argentina, some of their funding bodies, having some initiatives regarding motherhood specifically. But it’s not a lot.

And also the numbers of women in science in Brazil are a little higher than we have in, in other countries.

So we are trying to, we have started doing a survey, trying to gather all the information we have from all the funding bodies, in many of the countries from Latin America, to actually have a clear view of what’s happening in the region, if there is anything there is common ground that we can work together to change.

But what we have so far is something more. There isn’t even in some countries, there isn’t even people talking about this, women in science in general, but even more specifically about parents in science.

So it’s going to be quite a challenge to actually see something happening in a few of these countries we had a look at.

Julie Gould: 08:42

When the movement started presenting data to funding bodies, research institutions and universities, they were all very receptive to the conversations.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 08:51

But we still have a lot of conversations, and not actual practices being implemented.

So we never had anyone like denying that there was a problem, which is pleasing. We know that. But the does not mean that they will actually engage in doing something for real to change that.

Julie Gould: 09:14

That has changed since the movement has grown. And in 2021, it was awarded the Inspiring women in Science Outreach award organized by Nature Research Awards in partnership with the Estee Lauder companies.

One place where the parents and science group have been advocating for change since 2018. Is with the Lattes platform, a database of all Brazilian scientists’ CVs,

Fernanda Staniscuaski 09:37

You have to register there to apply for fellowships and funding, resources and everything.

And, and that platform, there was no space to disclose any information at all. “Oh, I have this gap in my productivity. I have like few years that I didn't publish anything but there is a reason for that.”

Julie Gould: 10:00

So in 2021 Lattes added a new field that recognizes that career breaks of all kinds, not just maternity leave are part of the academic career journey.

The reason that this is important is because if you’re applying for any fellowship position, your productivity from the last five to 10 years is taken into account.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 10:20

And if that person has had only, or had a child, during that period, they will extend the period for another two years. So you have a longer view of the career of that scientist that will show they are OK, before having a child she was pretty productive. And she had a lot of publications and everything.

So that was one of the main changes we had here in Brazil. But it still is something that is not like a national initiative or anything. It depends on the institution.

My university has applied that for some of the calls they have. And also for the hire process in my university, they also, they also have included something related to motherhood.

But it’s still, it’s one institution, one graduate program, one funding agency.

So the main issue we are having right now it has to be some general rule about all the process for fellowships on anything.

It has to include something related to the pauses that we know that happens in womens’ careers due to motherhood.

Julie Gould: 11:31

It's not just professors and academics that are already in the system that need support. In Brazil, there is no national or federal regulation for students, whether graduate or masters, who need to take maternity leave.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 11:44

Here in Brazil, we have one agency that evaluates all the graduate programs. And one of the things they evaluate is the time the students take to complete their Masters or PhD degrees.

And of course, if you take a leave, it’ll be a longer period of time. So they do not want to let you take the leave, and things like that.

So we are working with this agency that is called CONICET that oversees all the graduate programs in Brazil.

They already updated. They collect all the data for the evaluation, including a field for these student leaves.

And what do we want now it’s something really simple. You just don’t add up the time the student was away on leave on the time they were considering for the PhD or their master’s degree completion.

Julie Gould: 12:40

So the Brazilian Ministry of Education has now also created a working group…

Fernanda Staniscuaski 12:45

….to develop a national policy for the permanence of mothers in the higher education system here in Brazil.

So was was a huge… well, it is still very at the beginning of the working but still a major advancement here.

Julie Gould: 13:05

Small steps have been made. But Fernanda and the Parent in Science group have bigger dreams for the future. The challenge as always in Latin America, is financial support.

However, if we lived in an ideal world, here's what Fernanda would like to see,

Fernanda Staniscuaski 13:19

Mothers and their particular demands are a priority when we are talking about allocating funds. That is our education in science.

And that is really powerful, because it’s not just for the mother. When you help a woman that has children to improve their education, their professional aspirations, their professional goals, you have an impact on their children and everything.

So it’s what we’ve been discussing here in Brazil. Social mobility is really dependent on education and accessing high paying careers, that will have to go through having a (oh my God), higher education, having a higher education, access and everything.

Julie Gould: 14:14

And for professors and researchers that have established careers in academia. Fernanda would like to see some real changes in what is considered an academic career.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 14:22

We have this idea that you have to go your undergrad or grad students and you get a position at university with no pause, with no deviations in this career.

So, and that impacts a lot how women progress in your career here in Brazil.

In general, not talking about specific areas of knowledge, women are already the majority of undergrad and grad students.

But when we go further down the line looking at who are the professor or set our universities who are the people that is leading our the funding agencies. Who are our ministers and everything? It’s just men.

And that’s because, if along the way from beyond being a grad student to becoming a professor, you have any pause or any deviation, we will suffer. Your career progression of suffer. So I think the ideal will be to accept that people have different trajectories in their career.

And that does not mean, that does not imply they’re not committed to their career. That does not imply they're not able to pursue a career in academia or in science. It’s just because life happened.

Julie Gould: 15:41

Indeed, life does happen, as it did for Fernanda whose career in biological research came to a halt when she started her family.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 15:48

If I look back, right now, I see it was not personally, was not as much as a problem as I was seeing at the time. And that’s because, of course, I’ve matured a lot.

But I still think it was pretty drastic when I think about my professional life. Because I made the peace, that was nothing related to myself. So it was not my ability to to keep up with my career or anything. I made my peace with that I know, it wasn’t my fault.

But it was really devastating regarding my career, even when I look at today, of course, because of the Parent in Science movement, and everything that I’ve accomplished, that is just a word a small part of my career. But if I have persisted in the molecular biology field, that would have had a really negative impact.

Julie Gould: 16:49

Yet, despite being an advocate for women, especially mothers in science, and all the work she's done with the Parents in Science group, Fernandez still has problems getting funding for her research,

Fernanda Staniscuaski 16:59

I still do not have a really big record on being, like, a researcher in this specific area, mothers in science, everything, although we have done a lot, it’s still really recent.

So a lot of times when I tried to apply for grants and everything you say, “Oh, but you are a biologist and you are working in this field. So we don’t see how you can be doing both things.”

And things like that. So I don't know. It's still something that I see as a big really big issue in my in my career.

Julie Gould: 17:36

I asked Fernanda to share some advice for any female scientists who are mothers, or those who are considering motherhood and want to continue their work in science.

Fernanda Staniscuaski 17:46

You're not alone, is something that it sounds really simple, but it made me…it was something that I missed when I was going through that period in my life.

Know that I wasn’t alone. And it was not just myself that was going through that.

So the main thing I have to say to anyone that is going through a period like that is, it’s not yourself. It is something really bigger than that. It’s a structural problem we are trying to solve, but it’s still really present. I know it’s hard to say “Just keep up with everything, trying and fighting the system and everything.” But I think that’s the only way we will be able to win this.

Julie Gould: 18:37

Fernanda’s story takes me back to episode one of this series where Monica stone, the Vice Rector of research, partnership and collaboration at the University of the Valley Guatemala, based in Guatemala City, said:

Monica Stein: 18:49

There is no cookie cutter, woman scientist, there’s no one single way to approach science and do science. That was a big one for me. I thought there was a single path. You got your PhD, you got your postdoc, you got your tenure, otherwise you’re a failure.

It’s okay to be a woman science in teaching a woman scientist in teaching. It’s okay to be a woman, scientist and industry. It’s okay to be a woman scientist in management.

Because as long as you’re having impact, and that impact is fulfilling you and also contributing to building a better ecosystem, you are a woman in science.

And I think that's very important that women internalize. That there are many ways to be successful at what they want to be.

Julie Gould: 19:36

Fernanda’s story is just one example of this. And in the next episodes, we'll share stories from different female Latin American scientists who've made it to the top of their chosen science career professions.

Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould.