Mary Ann Mason on Postdoc Childbirth Regulation Tangle
Dear friends of women in science,
Recently Mentor Net posted an article Mary Ann Mason wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education (see it here). You may recall her guest post on this forum (see it here). She discussed an effort to examine the many diverse regulations from various federal entities that influence how postdoctoral chidlbirth leaves are handled. Universities often have different policies from each other. At a particular site, postdoctoral fellows can be funded from many different sources, each with different regulations. Foreign and domestic postdocs may have different policies affecting them. Regulations may preclude childcare leaves if a postdoc has not worked at that site for a year in advance. Some grants provide funds for leaves, but only if all postdocs at that site also are given leaves, which is rarely true.
The article quoted Michelle Obama, who has become involved in trying to bring together the various entities to create a joint set of policies for postdoctoral fellow childcare, a policy for both sexes and all fields, but clearly of great benefit to women in science.
Mary Ann Mason pointed out that, "Here at the University of California at Berkeley, our national study of the dropout rates of women in the sciences looked at the 61 members of the Association of American Universities (the top research institutions in the country). We found that only 23 percent of them guaranteed a minimum of six weeks' paid leave for postdocs, and only 13 percent promised the same to graduate students." She went on to say that of those postdocs who had a child while at UC, over forty percent indicated they had changed their career aspirations away from becoming a research professor at a university.
It would be a very good thing, it seems to me, to be able to bring order to this chaos of conflicting regulations and ask universities in the US to offer a unified policy, one that matches that of a consortium of major granting agencies. Let's hope they succeed!
Best,
Laura Hoopes
Dear Laura:
I don't know why you think the granting of leave is covered by federal law but the granting of pay is not. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers all terms and conditions of employment. If a woman employee covered by Title VII wants time off, either on sick leave or annual leave, for a condition connected to her pregnancy, both the granting of time off and pay are governed by Title VII, as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. She would be entitled to whatever time off and pay the employer would give other employees who need time off and pay for similar reasons.
I was going to add that individual employers may, of course, grant employees more than federal law requires but if an employer does go over and beyond what the law requires for pregnant employees only, the employer might be vulnerable to a complaint of sex discrimination by male employees.
Hi Helen and Sonia,
The granting of the leave is, of course, covered by the laws Sonia summarized so well for us before. However, whether or not the institution or grant PAYS the woman or man on childcare leave seems to be much more discretionary and inconsistent, and when you're a poorly paid postdoc, that decision can make all the difference in whether or not you feel its tenable to stay in the field for childbearing years.
I'm pretty sure that's where the diversity in approaches lies. Certainly, there are lots of grants that won't let foreign women get funds for things that US citizens can be supported for, including childcare leaves.
cheers,
Laura
I don’t understand the first sentence by Mary Ann Mason. I don’t know about universities but there isn’t a hodgepodge (that’s one word, not two) of childbirth policies from federal agencies. Federal laws dealing with childbirth are spelled out in my article that was published on this very website.
It’s at:
http://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/women-in-science/sonia-pressman-fuentes-on-pregnancy-leave-parental-13179251
There really does need to be some consistency here, but it has to be handled at the broad level of postdoc status at institutions instead of just for maternity coverage. The issue is only there because of the ambiguous "trainee" status that allow institutions to define whatever they feel is acceptable for this group of folks. And that determines leave requirements and causes inconsistency even at the same institution. For example at my postdoc institution, our PI gave us 6 weeks paid leave because he was very generous. His wife gave 3 months and a technician to help out to make sure the mom was not negatively impacted by the time off. Neither gave any time off for the fathers except for the actual birth.
Hi FBP and Lillian,
I know. I had one week off when I had my son at University of Colorado Med Center, and I had a semester off at Occidental College when my daughter was born. The one week was terrible. I was a postdoc and it was all up to my boss. At Oxy, there was policy, and I was a faculty member.
Postdoc years are the best childbirth years and we need to make it more possible for women to have children during that time, in every way possible. And certainly fairness is very important; it's demoralizing when one person in the lab gets leave and another cannot.
cheers,
Laura
Dear Laura,
Yes, yes, yes. I hope they succeed too. It's so hard. Almost all of my best postdocs are foreign women, and getting any leave for them takes hours of my time. Even then, sometimes I just can make it happen.
FBP
Hi Laura,
You know this is a real mess when Washington notices! I hope they are able to pull together some joint policy because it is a real juggling act. Some postdocs get nothing and others get 6 or 8 weeks. It's profoundly unfair, and I'm not surprised a lot of people opt out after trying to deal with it.
LRJ
